MFW Exploring Countries and Cultures VS WP Children Around the World

[jerrysgal4ever]

I think I have narrowed down my choices for next year to these 2 curriculums. I can't seem to decide between them. WP seems to cover a lot more countries over the year. which I liked but looking at their samples, all the activities are overwhelming. I tend to try to "do it all" and it looks like they have some type of "celebration" every week. MFW has half as many countries, a reasonable amount of hands-on, but not sure our family is totally aligned with some of their faith-based materials. We prefer to use our own scripture studies--- maybe wouldn't be a problem with ECC but it would in the higher grades. I will be homeschooling a 6 yr old 1st grader, a 12 yo daughter with learning challenges, and a 13 yo 8th grader with some milder learning challenges. We love literature-based curriculum and a reasonable amount of hands-on. I am not organized enough to do "lots" of hands-on, lol.  Has anyone here had experience with both of these and could give me a really good pros and cons review? TIA!!

[SilverMoon]

Personally we enjoyed WP far more than MFW, but I haven't used either of those specific sets. MFW's history felt like it was spreading itself too thin trying to reach too many grade levels, and not getting any of them particularly well. One spine would only hope to hold the older kids, but left holes filled by another spine that the little kids liked but the big kids felt was babyish. There weren't many hands on projects and the notebooking pages were underwhelming. In the end the big kids moved on and the little ones finished it. I passed it on and didn't buy from MFW again. When I bought WP it was only for one kid to use and he was in the middle of the grade range they listed it for. There was a LOT of reading, but we liked nearly all of the suggestions. We love lit heavy anything. The notebooking pages weren't exactly meaty, but they were engaging and enjoyable. He was able to do many of the hands on projects himself, and he chose which ones he'd rather skip on his own most of the time. He finished the whole set, still thinks fondly of it years later, and it's sitting in the closet waiting for little siblings to grow into it. 

This is just one family's experience with one year from each of them. It may not be very helpful since it wasn't the specific years you are looking at, but at least it'll give you a bump? 🙂

[ChocolateCake]

I used MFW ECC a few years ago.  I have no experience with WP.  I agree that it may be difficult to meet the needs of different ages with it exactly as written.  You may have to tweak it a bit.  I decided to just get the basic package used off of Ebay and have the kids make lapbooks instead of using the student sheets since I wasn't really impressed with them the year before for second grade (Adventures in U.S. History).  My kids were only in 1st and 3rd grade so this worked out really well.  The book basket is a big part of ECC so you may want to see if your library has books about the countries that will be studied.  We added in some countries that we didn't do lapbooks for and just spent a week on them.  Other countries we spent two weeks on. We mostly used homeschoolshare.com for the lapbooks and I also based some of our studies on the books my library happened to have since there were almost no books about some countries.  I made sure to add in the countries of our family's ancestry and they participated in a geography fair that year.  I remember a lot of folks complaining on the MFW ECC FB page about the science book being boring (Properties of Ecosystems) but we actually liked it.  There's hardly any experiments so that's something to consider.  There's some hands on acitivities in the teacher's guide that seemed a bit babyish even for my 1st grader (pretend to ride a plane to the country, etc.).  If you live near an IKEA they sometimes have Kids Kamp events where there is a free craft and play passport so that's something that your 1st grader may enjoy.  We also used Home Art Studio First Grade art DVD which happens to be about art from different cultures. If your library has the Christian Heroes series of books, you can pick some countries based on those missionaries and have your older kids read those (some are available on audio on the Hoopla app).