Writing & Rhetoric Book 4: Chreia & Proverb

My daughter is enjoying this book as she has with the other books in this program. She is growing in her writing skills. I appreciate the wholesome stories that lead to wonderful conversations.

Helpful companion to the student book

Excellent writing program! It's really helped my daughter understand how to structure an essay.

Easy to follow. Great writing curriculum!

My son does not like to write. This book allows us to move a bit slower and work our way up from topic sentence writing to essay writing.

Learning to write is fun with these books!My daughter (5th gr.) enjoys the Writing and Rhetoric series.

In this book, children are asked to read the story of Lady Godiva and write a chreia praising her. I don't consider a woman riding naked through a town as a proper subject for school children, much less as a "heroine" to be praised! The other books in this series are good, but this one can be skipped. Besides the Godiva story, my kids were not too impressed with Queen Elizabeth either. Is it really that hard to find heroes for children to praise?And, as another reviewer stated, the chreia formula gets very repetitive. Kids get it after 2 or 3 sections, and do not need to keep repeating the same formula through the whole book. I hope book #5 is better!

My homeschooled daughter (fourth grade) really enjoys the writing and rhetoric series, however this book - book number 4 - missed the mark for us.This book really had a lot of the same elements that we enjoyed in the first three books - good stories, with good exercises leading up to the big activity for the week. The stories had a common theme: making the dark ages not seem so very dark. Unfortunately, the final exercise of most chapters was the Chreia. The books have a recommended format for the chreia, and the format is really disjointed. It is very difficult to come up with an essay that sounds good using that format. Even the example chreia in the teachers manual sounded disjointed and didn't flow well in my opinion.My advice? There are a couple of chapters in this book that cover topics that your kids need to know: literal and figurative language, and also topic sentences. Unless you want to buy this book for reading the passages only, skip this book and teach your kids about literal/figurative language and topic sentences on your own.That's right: skip it. If you liked the first three books, and you don't think the fourth book sounds good, then you don't need to abandon the series. I had my daughter go directly into Writing and Rhetoric number 5, and we're back to essays that she can make sound good with recommended formats that are easy enough to work with.