Before I decided on the CM approach to history I flip flopped between SOTW and MOH. A mom in our homeschool group was using SOTW and I thought it was so cool (my son was not in her class), so I researched it and came across MOH. I fell for that one hard. I bought the book, studied the lesson plans, purchased needed supplies and off we went. We made it to lesson 11, Ancient Egypt. I just couldn’t go any further. It went too fast through the civilizations/people/places you were covering and I just didn’t feel like there was a layering affect going on. The lessons are not CM style at all, imho, they are facts written in “Have you ever wondered about…” then paragraphs about the topic. Nicely written, I must add, and fine for an adult looking for info on a topic but not a good fit for my family of boys ages 9 1/2 and 6 1/2 at the time, I believe. In the program you are encouraged to have your children summarize the “story” on a 3×5 card and file it under it’s proper place (binder/card file) for use at another time, well, my oldest had not been summarizing much (written narration after oral narration is fine tuned) so that was a nightmare for both of us. My middle boy could summarize pretty quick and that just made it worse:( The mapping was useful (I made a ton of copies we’ll use eventually, I hope) and some of the suggested activities were appropriate for their age. I also made the suggested timeline which turned out nice, but with a 2 yo at the time he just wanted to rip it up and I didn’t have a place to hang it out of reach. We are going to do a portable one, notebook style, in the fall.
I am keeping the book as a reference guide (it has great pictures and information I may find valuable in the future) as a mom from this site suggested.
Okay, that wasn’t meant to criticize a program, but just give my honest assessment after really trying to use it, but making the decision to convert to CM made it difficult to tweak to fit my new goals/approaches for my family.
I do know there is reference to our Lord, maybe more than SOTW, but I believe the program/lesson plans are very similar and neither are CM friendly, imho.