Winterpromise?

[chrissy]

Anybody use any of this stuff? What do you think?

[mamarasheika]

i have been really considering their children around the world program.
i would love to hear more.......

mamar-r

[Terabith]

I'm starting their I'm Ready to Learn program with my almost four year old. I think it really looks pretty awesome. The only caveat with a lot of the older units (Children around the world, animal worlds, american history, etc) is that they are really elaborate unit studies. They have a lot of science or social studies, but they don't include things like language arts or math.

[annethcz]

We've been using Animals and Their Worlds for a couple of weeks. I also purchased the 1st and 2nd grade readers for AW, although we're not using WP's LA program. I'm using AW with all of my kids- age 7, 6, 5 and 3. It took a little while to settle into a routine and figure out how to make it work for our family.

First of all, we ditched all of the religious materials, which don't work for our family. If I had only purchased the basic prek-grade 1 program, we wouldn't have much left to work with. But the 2nd grade and up materials add SO much to the curriculum.

I'm also not entirely thrilled with the schedule. It's even worse than Sonlight in terms of books being broken up and segmented. If we did the WP schedule as written, each day we'd be reading 2 pages out of 10 different books. No thanks! I've found that it works much better if I approach the schedule as, "this is what we should do this week" and just check things off as we complete them, rather than "today we're going to read 1 page of X and 2 pages of Y and one section of Z." I also dislike the way the older children have a separate schedule of books that isn't included at all on the instructor's guide. Because I'm not going to give my kids their own schedule, that means I have two pages of schedule to look through myself. I really wish they would've put everything on one page for the parents.

Those gripes aside, we're really liking AW. I've found that it works really well for me to have the kids sit down at the table and color while I read the books for the day. The kids don't get bored, they enjoy the books, they enjoy the coloring, and everyone is happy. I also really like all of the crafts that are scheduled. You don't have to do every craft, it's easy to pick and choose. But I love having crafts planned out for me. My kids (my girls especially) love crafty things, and I really appreciate having the crafts scheduled to coincide with what we're learning about.

[TexasSuz]

We are doing American Story 2 from Winterpromise this fall! I can't wait! I love teh look of my box and think it will work out for us.