Renee Emerson

This year I used The Playful Pioneers curriculum from Peaceful Press for my 5 and 7 year old girls. Here’s what I thought:

1. I loved the week at a glance and daily schedules–it was open and go, easy to use
2. The curriculum was absolutely set for the right ages (K-2nd is the range recommended on the website)–both of my daughters enjoyed it.
3. It is inexpensive– $49 but often you can get a discount (I think I caught it on sale for around $30?)
4. It is a Charlotte Mason based approach, which includes much of which we were doing when we did Ambleside Online (Year 1)–poetry, nature study, living books, bible study, hymn singing. What I liked about it MORE than I liked about AO Y1 was that it was so gentle–the readings were age appropriate, the activities were fun, and it made education enjoyable for my young girls.

The few thing I did not like:

1. Many of the activities were not seasonally appropriate for our middle american town–I know the writer lives in California, so they can go look for ladybugs in February, but we still had snow on the ground
2. Some of the recipes called for unnecessarily complicated / expensive ingredients–I’d rather keep it simple!

All in all, I would absolutely recommend this curriculum for any child ages 5 – 8. We added our own Math (Math U See) and Reading (All About Reading) and did supplement with a Spanish curriculum and of course I had to add my own poetry selections too, but everything else you need is there. At the end of the year, my girls particularly loved looking at the Historical Timeline they made and we plan to finish up the rest of the Little House books over the summer.

They have another curriculum for older kids but we don’t plan on going with it next year–we are taking the plunge with Sonlight!