What can you tell me about Winter Promise?

[Pam H]

I'm looking at using the Animals in their Worlds with my 2nd grader. Dx PDD-NOS. He is frequently distractable and a little behind in reading. But he loves animals.

 

The curriculum looks wonderful. The reviews I've read are less than stellar. What think you? Please, give me the good the bad and the ugly.

[SnowWhite]

I can't review ALL of the program since it has been rewritten since we used it. And I'm not a SN mom, but I am happy to tell you what I know.

 

The good: Wonderful visually appealing resources, lots of Mommy/kid lap or side by side time to look at them. Engaging read-aloud stories if your ds likes listening to chapter books. Hands on activities if that is your ds's cup of tea.

 

The bad: if your ds isn't up to the listening or the hands on it might be a bit of a stretch. I pushed my ds when he was a first grader to listen to all of the Ency readings and I heartily regret it.

 

The ugly: WP has a less than stellar reputation for shipping times and consistency. I have not had any issues, or rather they were quickly corrected as soon as I called WP. Some people find the schedule "choppy"... but perhaps that has been fixed by the new edition. They took the alphabet study out of the older students' version which should have helped some of the discontinuity.

[calandalsmom]

I really like this program.

 

 

I agree that the schedules are choppy and sometimes WP doesnt ship well- I solve this by buying exclusives from WP and everything else from Amazon.;)

 

The program has a lot of excellent factual material, relies on good solid books like DK which work (or tend to) well with kids on the spectrum.

[Dobela]

WP has changed the program since we used it so I can't comment about it now. When we used it before my son didn't like the choppy feel and the constant changing of books. We never finished it actually. We still have some of the nonfiction books though and love looking thru them still.

 

I am one that was extremely disappointed by their shipping practices. My books were horribly packaged and barely arrived intact. When I called to complain about how they were packaged I was not happy with the response. I would do as calandalsmom and only order the exclusives thru WP. Some of the others, in particular the fiction titles, you may be able to check out from your library and the others I would order elsewhere.

 

There is/was a large yahoo group for Winter Promise that was the most helpful when we were using it. Many people in the group had children with special needs and they would share how they had to modify the curriculum.

[chiguirre]

We liked the core, but the LA was not a good choice for a kid who is not a natural reader, let alone a SN kid. You'll have to pick and choose and adapt the core to your child, but you have to do that anyway for any kid and there's a lot of fun stuff in there. I'd also choose readers that will work for your son, and look at them carefully. The leveled readers that went with LA1 had a lot of sight words and were very difficult for a beginning reader. I'd either go back a level or skip them entirely.

[calandalsmom]

I would not recommend their lower level LA (prek-2) to anyone. Its EXTREMELY accelerated in some places, wile being appropriate in others imo.

 

And my 6 yr old is a very fluent reader and I find her sort of in between all the levels.

[Pam H]

What are the other choices for a HFA? My major interest is creating a love for learning. He can do the work in small spurts.