DIY Homeschooler

For Memory’s Garden for Grade Schools by Lucia May Wiant was a text used in the public schools at the turn of the century.

FOR MEMORY’S GARDEN is intended to instill in the minds and hearts of boys and girls the honoring of parents, patriotism, truth telling, thrift, honesty, kindness and cheerfulness, together with all moral attributes and the other qualities highly esteemed in the well-poised character.

For each grade (1st grade through 8th grade), the book offers 40 selections to memorize throughout the year. The selections are taken from:

• The Bible.
• Benjamin Franklin.
• Thomas Jefferson.
• Charles Dickens.
• Robert Louis Stevenson.
• Shakespeare.
• Sir Walter Scott.
• George Macdonald.
• James Russell Lowell.
• Alfred Lord Tennyson.
• William Wordsworth.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
• John Greenleaf Whittier.
• A variety of newspapers.
• Many, many others.

For Memory’s Garden takes the approach of arranging the selections in a sequence to coincide with the normal seasons and holidays in a school year: Autumn will be encountered in each grade with the fifth selection (or fifth week), for example. Thanksgiving in week ten, and Christmas in week fifteen. This means that if you have students at more than one level working through the text they will be focusing on roughly the same theme.

These little verses are but restatements of divine truth, for all truth is divine, and the mind can best work when it has a definite task to perform.

If you are looking for quality copywork and memory work, here it is. Eight years of poetry once per week. Perfect for the DIY homeschool mom. And free!

Free eBook

• Read online
• PDF
• EPUB (convert to Kindle)

Suggestions

• Since there is one selection per week, have your student read through the selection on Monday.
• On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, your student can copy the selection in a copybook. This helps aid memorization.
• On Friday, have your student recite the selection.
• You’ll also want to review once a week to retain those selections already memorized.
• Another option is to copy each selection each week. But only memorize every 5th selection.

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Additional Resources

Memorizing: Yes, It Does Have Its Uses! ~ 5 Things to Memorize
Why memorize.