Horizons Preschool Program

I bought this curriculum to homeschool my 4 year old daughter. After planning pre-k 3 on my own last year, I was looking for a curriculum that was rigorous for her, but easy for me to follow and prepare. This does fit the bill. I am reviewing the curriculum only, I did not purchase media set.
The curriculum comes with 2 teacher manuals- one for the first half of the year and the other for remainder- and 2 student books- that has multiple worksheets to work on each day, also broken up into the first and second half of the year, a cd with some songs, and a loose packet of reproducibles, flash cards, extra material, etc.
First of all, even though very detailed, the lesson plans in the teacher manuals are very lengthy and time consuming just to read through. Then materials for each lesson need to be pulled from the work book, and the loosely bound packet, and prepared (which sometimes involves cutting the flash cards, making copies because the pages are both front and back and cannot be cut, or getting extra construction paper ready to use with that page).
Next, many of the activities listed in the lesson plans involve whole class work (I bought this to homeschool one child so these do apply to me) and some require a great amount of extra supplies. Some of the supplies are as available in your home as aluminum foil or paper plates, but some list a recorder, a calendar system, a globe, things that may not be readily available and are costly.
The lesson plans list up to 11 or more subjects, which can be easily simplified into just a few. If these subjects, sometimes there is a song, poem or story that can be read from the lesson plan, but then the teacher would need to come back to that page in the lesson plan book to read it- it would be much better if that piece were in the work book where the teacher could just pull it out and have it on hand rather than having to pull out the teacher manual, find the page in the lesson it is on and read from there.
There are bible memory verse cards, that are in both KJV and NIV, if interested in knowing which translation of bible is used. The material taught in the curriculum are letters, colors, numbers 1-10, shapes and a few additional pieces such as season and time. I was hoping for a few more "themes"persay and was disappointed that there aren't any. I will need to supplement this curriculum with a great deal of reading.
Some things that I liked were there is a supply list located in the from of the teachers manuals and a book reading list, but when looking over the lists was discouraged by how much EXTRA I had to do to prepare. I planned the first week of this new school year following the lesson plans and preparing materials. There were many things I chose to skip and it still took over an hour of my time. For the cost of this curriculum and what is included, it is just not worth the money and time. I have two other children in elementary school and it takes 15 minutes or less to prepare both of their school weeks each week, so I would definitely recommend a different preschool curriculum for homeschool, even dollar store workbooks would be more time effective and cheaper than this. I can't comment on their media set or other grade levels, but pre-k 4 is just not worth it.

The Horizons Preschool Program is hands down the best If you have used other Horizon material you can expect the same quality from this program It is very thorough covering everything you need to know and teach There is no guessing! Some teacher prep is necessary but it is very teacher friendly The Teacher's manual is absolutely necessary You get the chance to discover what kind of learner you have The cost is well worth it The only complaint I have is that the teacher's manual is not spiral bound like Horizons teacher's manuals have typically been and the Rainbow review indicates it is But that was easily fixed at my local office storeI will definitely use this again!