Curriculum Part One: Sonlight

I consider myself a curriculum junkie. I spend way too much time looking at what's out there, what people think about it, and considering how I would go about implementing it in my home. Therefore, I can't confine myself to just a list of what we are using. I feel a need to explain why and give the reader something to base their own curriculum decisions upon, as so many others have done for me. And while I may love to read about what's out there, I do not "curriculum hop," jumping from one program to the next. Once I find something that works, I stick with it.

So what works for me? Sonlight. I stumbled upon Sonlight when searching for a quality reading list for my then first grader, Bug. She had just annihilated a reading program that was supposed to last the year and it was the end of November. Clearly, I needed something a bit more substantial and looked promising. I purchased their Core 2 Readers IG. It was around $6 and I figured it wasn't much to lose if I didn't like it. She tore through those books too, and we found that we loved the narration approach to assessing comprehension while using the suggested questions as a check list. She would begin telling me about what she had read and I would check off the questions she had addressed. When she was done we would go over any concepts that she had missed, and there usually weren't any. I still had a few months of first grade left for her, so I purchased the Core 2 Readers Advanced IG and she begged to keep it going through the summer while she polished off the book list. I turned around and ordered the complete Core 3: Introduction to American History, Part 1 for the coming school year. And it was somewhere around December that I knew I had fallen head over heals for a curriculum.

When Sonlight teaches history it uses a variety of methods. There are workbooks and textbooks that act as a spine, and then there are living books that put some meat on the bones. It sounds simple enough, but what I didn't understand from just looking at it was the looping that occurs in such a method. For example, Bug would read about Paul Revere in her textbook, The Landmark History of the American People, and then read about him again and answer some questions about him in the workbook, The Story of the USA. She also got to listen to me read a biography, "And Then What Happened, Paul Revere?" That sounds like enough, right? Nope. She was also independently reading Mr. Revere and I, a story told from the horse's point of view. (One of Bug's favorites and isn't in the new core. What's up with that, Luke?) The moment of knowing this was a fantastic program came while I was reading Johnny Tremain to Bug and she lit up and said, "I know him!" when Revere entered the story. It was like a friend made a surprise appearance. That's how well Sonlight teaches history. People and themes are presented in a variety of formats, from different perspectives, and often enough that they become well known, not just memorized.

This year Boo gets her turn with Core 3 (or D, as it's now called) and she's putting her own spin on it. Boo is a voracious reader, even more so than Bug, and the reading assignments just don't work for her. She will read a book in a single day and then I'm left with two weeks of nothing waiting for the schedule to catch up to her. This year I decided to use a "book basket" approach to reading and put the Sonlight readers in along with other historical fiction books in a bag and she is allowed to pick what she wants to read and how quickly she wants to cover it. And because Sonlight's comprehension assessment is through narration and dialog, it's an easy adjustment to make. There aren't worksheets or projects that have to match up with specific books read in a specific order. And if she wants to skip a book completely (as she did with The Corn Grows Ripe) it's fine. I'm enjoying diving into this Core again and remembering that Columbus was looking for Japan, not India, when he bumped into North America. Boo started laughing when we read in Pedro's Journal that he was convinced that symbols on native objects were Japanese writing. Do you remember learning that in second grade?