Where Faith Grows: Level 1

It was hard for me to get past the fact that a large majority of the lesson is in the format of a conversation between two kids. Since my one kid was reading at a 1st grade level and the other wasn’t reading at the time, it was a burden to have to read the lesson out loud each time. Since it’s back and forth between a boy and girl, it’s odd for Mom to read both parts. I could see that there was some good content in the lessons, but I just didn’t like the format of the lessons. Also, this was setup to be 3 days a week. And the lessons were for two weeks. Our family works best if we basically have the same schedule every day. 3 day-a-week curriculums don’t fit well with our flow. Again, the content wasn’t bad, it just didn’t work for our family.

I did this with My 6 and 8 year old and they both loved it. Our smallest son, 3 at the time, would sit with us and watch and lesson as we did these lessons as well. They all loved the fact that I made the little brother and sister into a puppet and used different voices for each of their parts in the stories. Each week, I felt like the older boys could really relate to the stories and learn something based off of either their own experiences as brothers or from something they have done with their friends. I also liked the way that the memory verses were taught and how repetitive that part was.

This discipleship program is amazing! I have not seen anything else like it! The academy supplement especially brings the characters and concepts in the course to life, plus it includes a ton of faith-building MB read aloud videos that my kids listen to on repeat! It has been the perfect fit for our family ages ranging from 3.5 to 8.5.

Some things to note up front:
This course is best used alongside Language Lessons 1 and above.

At first I was trying to do this course simultaneously with Simply K but doing the recommended Hands-On activities in both of those books was way too overwhelming. We were also doing Foundations Phonics daily which is Bible heavy as well. Ultimately we dropped everything but phonics for a while and restarted Where Faith Grows when we were ready for language lessons 1 and it is working a lot better.

Have a plan for where you will keep all of the finished activitiy pages. I did not and most of ours got lost or mangled. I really wish I would have had them so that we could go back and review the lessons to further cement our learning.

If you are using the academy course supplement and have multiple students doing the course, I highly recommend just getting the PDF and printing out the activity pages. A lot of the pages are just dialogue which is read by the characters on the screen so they aren't really necessary to have in physical form. I tore out the activity pages and made photocopies which I think did save money for this particular course but I ended up losing some of the pages for a few months in the process. It would have been so much easier just to print it directly .

I'm doing where faith grows with my 8yr old. We enjoy it as it is open and go and focuses more on bible than more than Words. Highly recommend, it's fairly easy to understand and she can do all the activities. It's a yes in our book

I bought 2 of these books because I have 2 children. I wish I would have only bought 1 because they have lost interest in the coloring anyway. The lessons are short, sweet and powerful. I also think this is geared for young kids. Probably ages 6 and under.

My kid and I had fun doing this together, and after a couple years he still remembers some of the verses because of the tune we made for them.

my son loves that he can do this book on his own

My daughter loves Abby and Miah. She loves learning about Jesus. We're struggling with implementing what she learns but we will get there. I was somewhat raised in church but didn't learn any of what she's learning so it's been great for me too.

I love this book! My 9 year old loves doing this with my 7 year old, she feels like she is teaching, but she learns so much, too!

I am an outlier in the other glowing reviews on this curriculum; I simply don't like it. *And* my kids find it boring. Where to begin? Well, my first issue is the text is cluttered from lesson to lesson. The layout is confusing. It should say in much larger font and more clearly, "this is lesson 1, Day 1". Instead, it's in tiny print to the left side of the page - easy for kid to overlook.
Secondly, they will have tear out sheets that lead to an activity - say, the child is supposed to cut out pieces from this sheet and utilize them in the lesson. Fair enough. My gripe is that no where in that current lesson does it state explicitly to save the pieces it for a future lesson. We toss the pieces and lo and behold, we need them for a lesson later. It's annoying and poorly organized in that respect.
And my third complaint is that it takes great liberty with paraphrasing Scripture from the Bible. In Lesson 5, Day 1 they are learning the Creation story of Genesis. This is what it says: "The next day was day six. This is the day that He said for all of the creatures of the earth to be made. The cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth. The lions, elephants, bunnies and dinosaurs were all created on day six."

Excuse me? Dinosaurs were made at this time too? Really? Because my NIV Bible doesn't reference ANYTHING that sounds like dinosaurs are mentioned in the account of creation. "24And God said, 'Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.' And it was so. 25God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good."

I think this is taking a great leap by the author [McCullar] of this curriculum to make dinosaurs part of the Creation story here. The Bible simply doesn't reference them at this point. And I find it offensive that the author inserted them here, in the narrative. I realize that "Young Earth" versus "Old Earth" is controversial in homeschool circles, but I feel like the author putting this in there makes a mistake.

I don't recommend this curriculum, and I certainly won't be purchasing Level 2.

EDiTOR'S NOTE: As a company we hold to the biblical account of creation in Genesis. We believe in a literal six day creation and a young earth supported by the Bible in Genesis. We do believe that dinosaurs were a part of that six day creation being created on the same day with all land animals. You will find this teaching throughout all of our resources. You can read more about us here: https://www.masterbooks.com/about