The Story Of The World Curriculum and Why It Works (And When It Doesn't)
I've used Story of the World across three kids now, and I went from thinking it was the perfect all-in-one history program to being mildly annoyed with it, then settling into somewhere in between. It depends entirely on how much time you have on your hands and whether you're willing to supplement it. The basic structure is straightforward. Each volume covers a broad era—Volume 1 goes from creation through the medieval period, Volume 2 is the Renaissance through colonial America, Volume 3 covers early modern world history, and Volume 4 finishes with modern times. Each chapter has a readable narrative text, a companion reader with primary sources and deeper stories, a set of questions for comprehension, and a CD with narrated readings and some music. That's the core product. Here's where people get stuck: the narrative text moves fast. It's designed to be read aloud, and a single chapter can cover decades of history in twelve or thirteen pages. The Companion Reader helps, but the gaps are real. When I was first using it with my oldest, I noticed she could summarize events but couldn't connect causes to effects. She'd tell me what happened but not why it mattered. I started forcing her to write one paragraph per chapter explaining the chain of cause and effect. It took twenty extra minutes a week, but it changed everything about how she absorbed the material.
Using the Story Of The World Timeline Effectively
The timeline resource is one of those things that sounds great until you actually try to use it. There's a downloadable timeline you can print, and lots of people build their own. The problem is the printed timeline cards from the publisher are small and the events are crammed together. My workaround was printing them at 200% scale and using a large poster board on the wall. I pinned the cards in chronological order as we worked through each volume. This took about three hours of setup total, and then I'd add cards whenever we encountered something that wasn't already there. One thing nobody tells you about the Story of the World Timeline is that it's not comprehensive enough on its own for the later volumes. Volume 3 and 4 cover so much ground—the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, two World Wars—that the standard timeline cards run out of space around 1850. I ended up adding a second timeline specifically for modern history with events from newspaper clippings and encyclopedia entries. It's a slog but it works. If you're trying to keep this clean and neat, you're going to get frustrated. Another counter-intuitive thing: you don't need to do every chapter in order. Some parents treat it like a linear textbook and read straight through. That works fine for the first two volumes. By Volume 3, I started letting my kids pick interesting chapters and diving deeper into those while skipping the ones that felt rushed. The chronological framework still held together because the narrative structure does that work for you. It saved me probably ten hours per semester.
The biggest limitation is geography coverage. This curriculum is overwhelmingly Eurocentric. China, India, Japan, Africa, and the Americas outside of North America get very thin treatment. I tried to plug this by adding a simple world history map each week where we'd mark where we were and what else was happening elsewhere. It added fifteen minutes a week but made the program feel less lopsided. There's also the issue of the audio CDs. The narration is competent but dry. Some kids zone out during the read-aloud portions. I found that playing the CD while the student followed along in the book helped, and I'd pause occasionally to ask what just happened. Not constantly—just two or three times per chapter. It kept people engaged without turning it into a chore. For download links, the official Story of the World website sells the books and provides some free supplemental materials. The printable timeline cards are available through their website and various educational sites. There are also several teacher-created timeline resources on platforms like Teachers Pay Teachers that fill in gaps the original doesn't cover. I'd recommend looking at those before trying to build everything from scratch.
Get the Full Details
The program runs about $60 to $70 per volume for the complete set including the companion reader and audio. That's reasonable for what you get, but don't expect it to stand alone as a complete history education. Budget another $20 to $40 on supplementary materials if you want decent coverage of non-Western history. Some people will tell you it's too simplistic. They're not wrong. But for a family-history-overview-type program, it's hard to beat for ease of use. The trade-off is always breadth versus depth. You're getting a wide sweep of history, not deep analysis of any particular period. Knowing that going in saves you a lot of disappointment.
