My Father’s World

Marsha,

We tried Exploring Countries and Cultures one year, and used K at the same time. One thing to note is that they often don’t recommend combining all children into one program. A friend of mine went to a conference with me one year and the authors recommended that she use THREE programs. 🙂

We liked some of the activities and things that were in the program. We did have a few problems, and we would likely not use them again. The program seemed very slow-moving to us. In the spring, in the later months, they seemed to “run out of” activities to do, it was mostly just reading by then. And there was not nearly enough “meat” and almost no science. But we couldn’t afford to add much else after we bought the packages. Also, the children were bored, especially by spring when the stuff seemed to really slow down.

I think it is a reasonably good program but it just wasn’t a good fit for us. We really tend to chafe under programs with weekly schedules already printed out, because we are always either behind (Sonlight) or bored (MFW) but then ditching the weekly schedules seems silly when you just spent all that money on them. 🙂

I hope you get lots of opinions and don’t have to just rely on mine!

Michelle D

I did the same thing when we did Animals and Their Worlds. It was a great program, but the LA was not very CM and overwhelming, plus it was so choppy! I did keep all the books though and am using them in a FIAR type way with my four year old. She likes to do little narrations the first time through and then will frequently re-narrate them to anyone who will listen.

We use My Father’s World and we enjoy it. I work better if I have some things laid out for me and I don’t have to choose every book we read. At the same time the book lists in the back of the manual are appealing as well becasue we can pick and choose which ones to use or add others that we like. I cannot speak about Exploring Countries and Cultures because we did not use that, nor did we use any of the younger programs. We started out in Creation to the Greeks, Rome to Reformation, and now we are in Exploration to 1850. I believe they intended these manuals to be used for 3rd to 8th grade. Any children in that age group would be in the same period of history. The high school curriculum is written for independent study by the student with a meeting once a week with mom. Another plus for us is that we are in the same year as a couple of other families around here so we co-op together using the science in MFW. I think you can use it in a Charlotte Mason way very easily. Narrations for the readings, composer study is built right in, and MFW uses God and the History of Art for art. I just look ahead to see what artists will be covered that year and choose 3 or 4 of them and then do picture study with those artists. We also liked the way the Bible is used as part of the history and not a separate subject. Plus a good portion of their earnings go to Bible translation so I enjoy supporting that. AS I said before I need to have some of the work of curriculum planning done for me, otherwise I don’t get anywhere. So it is a good fit for us. That all being said, this site has great book choices and has some guides now too which I am sure would be just as handy.