Winter Promise - Animals and Their Worlds Final Weeks

Even though I haven't been posting our weekly adventures with Winter Promise, we have continued our journey. We finally finished our school year and J was thrilled that we managed to finish earlier than the children in school. She thought it was great that she was finished and everyone else had to go to school for a few more weeks. We clocked 187 days which was a feat in itself because of all of our traveling and family activities. I am so glad we started early in August. I believe we will do the same, if possible, this coming school year as well.

J finished All About Reading Level 2. Next year, we will move onto Level 3. I believe this summer I will review the sound and word cards, just to keep them fresh in her mind. I don't want to go through the "summer slide."

She has been "shark crazy" for a year. I have been buying her every shark book I could find at thrift stores as well as anything shark related - puzzles, models, plastic toys. In addition to learning our regular school stuff, we also worked on a unit about sharks, lap booking while we learned. You have a question about sharks, ask her!

Her favorite thing about this year - learning about all of the animals. We read every animal book I owned plus more! Animals are her thing and she loved that we focused on learning about her favorite things. This was definitely the right curriculum for her this year.

Final thoughts on Winter Promise: I truly loved that Winter Promise is trying to go digital. Their teacher manuals and activity books are digital files that can be downloaded onto any device. But the books required to use the program are not nor are they available as digital files. E-books aren't the same as physical books, who doesn't love to curl up to a good book? But with all of our traveling and what we do in life right now, digital books would be a great asset to our learning. It would ease the suitcase space that all of the readers and such take up. I am waiting for a program that it truly all digital but for now, I applaud Winter Promise for starting the process.

I chose Winter Promise this year because J asked to learn all about animals and they had a complete year dedicated to them. I liked that it was on a 4-day schedule which made it easier to add in hands-on projects as well as catch-up on reading days on Fridays. J loved all of the readers and chapter books that the program had but I found that it was "light" on the reading. It is not as intense as other literature based programs so I found myself adding more to beef it up. And even though the manuals are digital, the links to the websites did not work properly so I found myself searching for the extras they provided.

It comes down to this - would I choose Winter Promise again? Winter Promise gave J a year full of animal learning and sparked her interest to the max. Because of our extensive traveling and family situations, I was glad that it was as intensive as other literature based programs because I am a schedule keeper and I would have stressed getting behind. It provided what we needed for the year, I added extras as I saw fit. I would use Winter Promise again, most likely. But I am headed back to my true love - Sonlight. I will not totally discount Winter Promise but for now, I feel like we are ready to get back to more of a literature based program and J is ready for a stronger learning experience.

When I explained to J that we were going to go back to Sonlight next school year, she asked if they had the adventure books that Winter Promise had. I assured her that they did. She loved her school year and I am glad I was able to focus on what she asked to learn about. I just hope that in the future, these programs will become more digital based for those of us that could use the suitcase space. But for now, I will gladly give up the space for the great readers and such - it is definitely a sacrifice I am willing to make.

If you have any questions about Animals and Their Worlds, please contact me. I hope this review helped in some way.