Sometimes things work out so perfectly, even I can’t believe it. What I’m about to tell you is true, even though you’ll read it and say, “no way!” You’ll think I’m lying just for the sake of a good story. But this really did happen. About six weeks ago, I received a copy of the Famous Men of Rome set from Memoria Press for review. As often happens, I set it to the side to deal with it in a day or two. I didn’t mention to my Big Boy (my reviewing partner for this project) what the latest product was or even that we’d received a new product. We went on with our day.
TWO DAYS LATER, I was reading a book to Little Man about early Romans. The Big One was sitting in the room, working on something else. He looked up and said, “I feel like I know some things about ancient Romans, but I’d really like to know more.” Really? It’s like I was in a commercial. I was immediately able to say, “boy, do I have a book for you!” And hand him our brand new Famous Men of Rome Set. I’m sure this was my one serendipitous moment. I’ll never have the stars aligned that perfectly again.
This set includes three pieces: a student textbook, a teacher’s guide, and a student guide. When I first opened the package, I was honestly a little intimidated by it. We don’t generally homeschool in the way that requires corresponding workbooks and teacher’s guides. I mean, I appreciate that they exist, we just aren’t typically so formal. I think Big Boy was also a little intimidated. I mean, this looks like “School!” However, once we opened it we realized school might not always be so bad.
The textbook contains 30 chapters, each focusing on a different famous Roman man. It also contains a glossary of people and places, as well as maps, so you get a really good foundation for what is going on. The book goes in chronological order, starting with Romulus and ending with the end of the Western Empire, but if you happened to be studying, say, Regulus, the chapters are well written enough that you could skip to the middle and read that chapter and your child won’t be completely confused because of all the things they’ve missed. Of course, doing it in chronological order is ideal. This program is designed to be a year-long addition to your school day.
The student guide is a workbook that lays out the basics your child should take away from each chapter. It starts by restating the basic facts from the chapter, includes vocabulary, asks open ended comprehension questions, and also suggests activities. The first day we used this, I just handed it to Big Boy and said, “here, read the chapter and answer the questions.” As you can probably imagine, that was met with some eye-rolls and heavy sighs. He did answer the questions, and he did learn some things from his reading, but he didn’t have fun with it. After that we tried again. He read the chapter to himself, then we used the student guide together. Instead of filling in the blanks, we talked out the answers to the questions. The teacher guide includes everything in the student guide (with answers) as well as tests you may copy and print out to see how much your children retained.
We’ve really been enjoying this program once we learned how to use it in a way that works for us. This is a subject Big Boy is really interested, which helps. The program is ideal for grades 4-8, so he is on the younger end of the spectrum, which might explain his resistance to the workbook portion. We did not even attempt to share this with the Little Man, it is definitely not accessible to an early elementary schooler, but we’ll be revisiting it in a few years when he is more mature, because I think this has a lot of great information to offer in a concise way.
