- Audio CD’s: You can purchase a CD which narrates the textbook. The narration is done by Jim Weiss and is very well done. (If you aren’t familiar with Jim Weiss’ storytelling CD’s you need to check them out. My kids love them.) My kids really enjoy listening to the CD’s and both my boys have loaded it on their ipods. Often we have discussed a lesson and they are very familiar with the story because they have listened to them before bed in their room.
- Activity Book: The activity book which can be purchased separately contains numerous activities, coloring worksheets, maps, and questions. Personally, I wouldn’t use this curriculum without the activity book. If you use the activity book the teacher prep time is minimal and there are answers to all the review questions. You can make copies of the coloring sheets in the back of the book or buy a separate worksheet pack if you are using it with more than one child.
- Multi-level course: With six school-aged kids I’m always looking for curriculum that I can use with several children at a time. I am currently using this curriculum with my seven, nine and ten year old. My five year old listens along to the CD, but doesn’t always participate in the questions.
- Comprehensive: I’m surprised at the level of depth in The Story of the World. My kids are learning things in elementary school that I didn’t learn until college!
- Secular Worldview: Several years ago we used The Mystery of History and I loved how it wove together history and the Bible. This is my main problem with The Story of the World curriculum. While it isn’t anti-Christian it definitely isn’t presenting a biblical worldview. If this is a must- have for you, skip this curriculum and go with The Mystery of History.
- Difficult Discussion Questions: According to the CDB website, this curriculum is designed for grades 1-4. My kids might not be little Einsteins, but the end of lesson questions are very difficult. Even after listening to the chapters twice my 10-year old is able to answer about 70% of the questions correctly. My younger kids know the answers to about 40% of the questions. The discussion questions are not mandatory and we do them orally, I do feel like my kids can get discouraged when they don’t know most of the answers. It is hard to facilitate a discussion when every other answer is “I don’t know.”
This is how I’ve adapted The Story of the World for our homeschool. The kids listen to the lesson on CD while coloring the worksheet for that chapter. After listening to the lesson I ask them the discussion questions from the workbook. If they can’t remember anything from the lesson we listed to it again. We usually skip the narration questions. After the discussion questions we work on the maps together and then sometimes we do one of the projects. The entire lesson takes us about 45 minutes from beginning to end.
The workbook has an extensive list of reading supplements and occasionally we read from those too, but most of the time the lesson is comprehensive enough for the ages of my kids. If I was using this program with a middle school aged child I would definitely be using the supplements.
For the most part I have enjoyed The Story of the World. My kids are having fun learning about history. They enjoy the map work (most of them time) and the teacher’s edition is adequate. There is some teacher planning involved but it is minimal. They love listening to the CD’s before bed and it has definitely helped their retention.