There’s so much to learn about useful plants and herbs that we could benefit from using in our everyday life, but hey, who has time to really read up on it? Well, Joanne Davis has taken the complication out of figuring out how to study herbs, by choosing a useful text and designing a curriculum around it! The study uses 10 Essential Herbs by Lalitha Thomas as its basal text. The book focuses on ten particularly useful herbs, including: cayenne, chaparral, cloves, comfrey, garlic, ginger, onion, peppermint, slippery elm and yarrow. Each chapter discusses the herb itself in great detail, includes recommended internal and external dosages, and an alphabetical list of its applications, listed by ailment. There are plenty of the author’s personal experiences with the herb and its uses also, really driving home the many uses and potent power of each featured herb.

The study guide was written to turn the educational content of the book into a semester-long course on how to use medicinal herbs. It contains 90 days of lesson plans, each day including a reading assignment and an application of the day’s reading with the student working on their own Quick Reference Book. Each day after the reading, the student will work on part of their own reference guide, which results in reinforcement of the information they have read, and provides them with a book that they have made, which organizes the information from 10 Essential Herbs in an easy-to-use format. The Quick Reference Book assignments have students working on part of their guide every day, and include making poster pages for each herb, applications worksheets for internal and external use for different uses of each herb, record sheets for herbs used, "Application and Attribute" sheets for each of the herbs, charts, and more. Forms to record this information for the student’s book are included at the end of the guide for use, and are reproducible for your family’s use. Additional activities are also suggested at the beginning of the study for "herbal experience days". By the end of the study, the student will have learned a good deal about uses for these very common, very useful herbs, and have their own reference book as well! The author of the study guide has also thoughtfully made available a packet of reproducible herb illustrations (in case you or your student is not up to sketching their own herbs) for poster pages and other informational pages for their Quick Reference Guide. This is a unique curriculum, and it has been designed especially for homeschool use. As an exciting elective course, or a trip "off the beaten path" along with any nutrition or health program you may be using, I would highly recommend this study. Just writing the description, I kept getting so absorbed in it, it was hard to break away; I think I’m going to have to do this one on my own sometime! Note: 10 Essential Herbs is now out of print, but we are currently able to offer some slightly damaged/returned books at a larger discount. - Jess