In this study, the numerical solutions of the Fornberg-Whitham (FW) equation modeling the qualitative behavior of wave refraction and the modified Fornberg-Whitham (mFW) equation describing the solitary wave and peakon waves with a discontinuous first derivative at the peak have been obtained. To obtain numerical results, the collocation finite element method has been combined with quintic B-spline bases. Although there are solutions to these equations by semi-analytical and analytical methods in the literature, there are very few studies using numerical methods. The stability analysis of the applied method is examined by the von-Neumann Fourier series method. We have considered four test problems with nonhomogeneous boundary conditions that have analytical solutions to show the performance of the method. The numerical results of the two problems are compared with some studies in the literature. Additionally, peakon wave solutions and some new numerical results of the mFW equation, which are not available in the literature, are given in the last two problems. No comparison has been made since there are no numerical results in the literature for the last two problems. The error norms $L_2$ and $L_∞$ are calculated to demonstrate the presented numerical scheme’s accuracy and efficiency. The advantage of the scheme is that it produces accurate and reliable solutions even for modest values of space and time step lengths, rather than small values that cause excessive data storage in the computation process. In general, large step lengths in the space and time directions result in smaller matrices. This means less storage on the computer and results in faster outcomes. In addition, the present method gives more accurate results than some methods given in the literature.