Winter Promise: Quest for the Ancient World

I mentioned in my post listing Curriculum plans for the upcoming school year that we were making BIG changes to our homeschool curriculum plan. We’ve been homeschooling for 7 years now!! {sheesh!!} and we’ve been fairly relaxed, very eclectic, reading lots of good books, doing lots of wonderful unit studies. And we just finished 2 wonderful years of American History where I mostly pulled everything together myself.

The truth is, I enjoy pulling everything together myself. I’m a former teacher, I’m a researcher by nature, I love looking for the perfect craft to go with the perfect lesson plan, etc. But, I gotta tell you, it’s a LOT of work. Searching Pinterest for days on in can be exhausting. ha!

I also gotta tell you that I have looked at LOTS of curriculum programs before. I have looked. And looked. And looked. Even in searching for World History stuff, I looked allllll over the place. I came *this* close to purchasing another major program at a recent conference but just didn’t have  100% peace about it.

Then, I came home, looked at the Winter Promise samples and was hooked. WHERE have you been my whole life, Winter Promise? 🙂

Here are the specific items that drew me in to this program:

• assignment sheets ALREADY PREPARED for the girls for the entire year! They are already printed and put into a 3-ring binder for my girls, and my teacher guide is 1 weekly sheet also and I have those printed and in a binder also. (I might opt to spend a little more and get the print version next time. It is a LOT of pages and I ran out of ink halfway through printing and had to wait and order online. Cost might have actually evened out, not sure.) 
• an independent reading schedule to coordinate with the history – plus comprehension questions for each book!! So excited about the “independent learning” opportunities for my girls this year – this is an area I have felt lacking in the past.
• On the girls assignment sheets there are boxes for me to add in math, science, anything else I want to add for them.
• list of recommended videos to coordinate with the schedule for the year – and bonus!! Several of them are offered for free on amazon prime, which we already have a membership for!
• awesome notebooking pages, already found & done for me, for the whole year
• “missions” or projects EACH WEEK for Hannah to choose from and complete independently
• Links in the teacher’s guide to videos and online places for us to search out to add to our studies
• many of the same titles to be read through the year as other world history programs
• reading from BOTH Story of the World AND Mystery of History (I’ve always struggled to choose just one!) The schedule is already all written out for us
• 4 day week plans through the year
• very updated looking teacher guide, notebooking & worksheets to go along with everything (I know this is silly, but some of the samples I looked at online were so ancient looking!)

Winter Promise is a great blend of Charlotte Mason, quality literature, experience & activity based, and notebooking. I’m excited about all these great things that I love coming together in one place without having to piecemeal this year.

Now, in an effort to be totally honest, I will share with you that I was nervous to purchase this curriculum after reading a lot of negative feedback online. I was worried, for the most part, that I might not get my order – according to what I’ve read and even a personal friend shared with me. I have several friends who have LOVED Winter Promise, but just hearing the negative made me nervous to spend several hundred dollars in one spot. Remember, I’ve never done that before!! (buy an all-in-one-place boxed curriculum set.)

So, I reached out on the Winter Promise facebook page and the author, Kaeryn Brooks, answered all of my questions and put my mind at ease. I really did feel better after communicating with her. From what I understand, they do not offer the books that are now out of print anymore. So, that was one of the major problems. They also are a small, family run business, which I think is great.

And, for the record, I already received all of my Winter Promise curriculum and books for next year! I received the downloads the same night I ordered and then the next week received the books that came with the package. I had no trouble whatsoever with shipping or customer service.

While I do love the curriculum and think it is an AWESOME product, I am hopeful that Winter Promise will continue to improve their company so that many more people can enjoy it! Truly, they have such a GREAT product and I hope that their growing pains are getting smoothed out.

As a matter of fact, I think that Winter Promise curriculum is so great, I am going to start helping Kaeryn and her team coordinate social media and blogging a bit! After days and days of reading what I purchased, I was ready to help tell the world what a great product it is. 🙂

As I have been browsing and browsing the internet looking for information on curriculum choices and specifically Winter Promise, I wanted to share a few of the homeschoolers I came across that are using or have used Winter Promise and been pleased. I think that some of these blog posts might help you if you are looking for more opinions as well!

• Curriculum Choice ~ my sweet online friend, Kendra, wrote a FABULOUS review of the American History program from WP, she has SO much in her post, please take a look! She has also written a lot on her personal blog about how they’ve used the program in their home.
• See Jamie Blog shares her thoughts
• Jimmie’s Collage ~ Jimmie has several posts about how they used Winter Promise! She also wrote a longer review of WP a few years ago for Curriculum Choice.

As with all curriculum choices, some will love it and some will not. And you know what, THAT’S OK. God made each family unique, each homeschool situation unique, and it sure would be boring if we ALL used the same thing, wouldn’t it?? Not to mention the needs of our children are so individual and unique. I, for one, am thankful for the blessing of having choices available to me. So, there you have my thoughts about our latest adventure!! I hope to share more as our school year progresses about how Winter Promise is going in our home!

Are you making any changes in your homeschool this year?

Have you used Winter Promise before?

I’d love to hear from you!