Little passports worth the cost?

[My4arrows]

Has anyone used this? I was thinking of either getting the 3-5 yo or 6-9 year old set next year to pair for my younger guy with FIAR. I am wonder if the cost it worth it or if just putting together something similar makes more sense?

[Dmmetler]

My DD enjoyed getting the kits in the mail and working through them. We actually did many of the activities with a group, which was nice.

 

[Chrysalis Academy]

My dd really likes them. I don't know if they are really worth it, but we do flesh it out with related activities - we get animal books from the country, cookbooks from the country and make some recipes, etc.  I think she really just loves getting a package in the mail. But it has raised her awareness about world geography and culture.

[tm919]

Just from the other side... We got them for a year and I didn't continue. After the first month, the kits are very thin and really didn't stand alone -- I needed to supplement a lot for my kids to care at all. At some point I decided to just do it myself.

Edited March 28, 2016 by tm919

[Seeking Squirrels]

We didn't find it worth the cost. Our subscription is actually only in pause mode right now as I was waiting to see if it would be missed. It hasn't, so I'll be completely cancelling it. It was fun and DD enjoyed it, I just didn't find it worth the price tag.

[HomeAgain]

Well, we enjoyed it.  It is a bit on the low value side, but it did captivate my kid.  I ordered the kits to start arriving in July and started putting them back in our mailbox on the 1st of September, and continued monthly after that.  This gave me a chance to schedule a full month's worth of activities, books, and cooking to go along with it and reconfigure based on our needs.  Like, we have a large Asian festival one month, and I just swapped the kits to coincide.  Or the art museum had pieces in from Australia for 3 weeks..and so on.

 

We took many ideas from this woman's blog to incorporate motor skill work into it: http://livingmontessorinow.com/tag/little-passports/ and picked up a sticker pack at the dollar store that had the flags, animals, and landmarks for several countries.  We pasted them on index cards along with foam outlines of the countries that I made (two copies, one for mapwork, one for matching work) and left them out as a matching game.

 

FWIW, we really enjoyed that year. Not only did we get a chance to do something different each month, but he got to work on skills he really needed to learn and learn about his world.  We started "school" in August and spent two weeks learning his place in the world - person, family, home, neighborhood, city, state, country, continent, planet, solar system - before started so he got a good foundation for where's where and started off well.

[~Laura~]

I have a few friends that have ordered them so I looked through them. It wasn't worth the cost for us. I chose instead to make my own kits, I chose a country or region and added crafts ideas with supplies, snacks, a few non-fiction books along with at least one fiction book and anything else I found interesting. I used a cheap plastic container and would bring out a new one each month. For around $20, I was able to provide a lot more depth than what LP offers. Putting the kits together did take some time, so if I was short on that, I can see the benefit of LP.

[deerforest]

I asked my DD, and she says it was fun but not educational enough. She says it wasn't worth the money.