This blog post is part of a three part series of how we make the different curriculum we use for our home school and how I adapt them to work for us. The first part In this series shares some tips and tricks of how we use Sonlight.. The other parts in the series will go over how we have used both Math U See and All About Reading in our home school journey.
This is only 3rd full year using Sonlight (well 4 if you consider the half year when we were still following a traditional school calendar and hadn’t switch to year-round schooling yet). Our first year with Sonlight was overwhelming, but there was finally a point and amazingly it happened when I added a second core to our day and our youngest joined us in a more official capacity last year. I have learned a few tricks for not only doing 2 cores at once, but also simply not letting myself get overloaded with it all and making it work how I want it to work.
1. Use the Instructor Guide as a Check List: Some days we wanted to read more because we just have to know what happens or we have time, other times we double up reading to get though a book we aren’t particularly enjoying. Sometimes it makes more sense to not read something one day so we can add in an activity instead. Some days Momma loses her voice and can’t read aloud. We aren’t dictated to the daily as much as we see it as a goal.
2. Use Timeline as a Review: I wait to add the stickers to our timeline after a couple of weeks (se we can add more at one time). This allows us to review who or what something is on the timeline and recap what we have learned about this person or event.
3. Combine Where You Can: I just don’t have it in me to separate every subject. Sometimes a subject will be more advanced for my youngest daughter or it will be more simply for my oldest child. Combining them for some things saves us from having to spend all day in school. The safest areas we have successfully combined is our bible time, science, geography, art, and music. For a while I did allow my youngest to listen to all the red alouds and history from her sister’s core, but towards the end of C I knew the concepts were going over her head. She only listens in now if she is still working on her independent work when I begin working with her sister at the same time in the same room. I have now shifted read alouds so that bother girls are listening to my youngest read alouds currently, I see this fading out in the next few years as our oldest gets older and the books begin to be repeated for her as she did the same core. Right now, this book is new to her because we didn’t do Core A with her.
4. Be willing to Extend Learning Opportunities: For us this means we add in sequels to read alouds when we can. This also means we participate in the literature any why we can. We make food for the books, or we do some of the activities they do in the book (whether it’s a game they played, or we follow along on a map they journey they are taking.
5.Take Your Time: This kind of ties in with making the instructor guide a check list but be willing to slow down your pace or take a pause. You are the one who sets your calendar and your learning goals for the year. You are not ahead or behind according to anyone.
These simple tips and tricks have helped me embrace Sonlight and has us continuing to go back to the them for the foreseeable future.
I will end this post with a disclaimer, I am not being paid by Sonlight for this blog post. I have not and don’t foresee myself receiving money for this post. I do not have an affiliate program with them either. I spent the earlier years of my oldest daughter’s life researching home schooling. While I have a background in teaching, I was overwhelmed with all of the choices for EVERYTHING. I felt ai had a pretty good handle on the reading and math curriculum’s when we first started out. I jumped around a lot in
the early years of what I wanted to do. I really wanted a literature-based home school. I loved to read, and I wanted out girls to love to read too. Sonlight scared me at first, the price the guides all of it was over whelming. I dipped my toes in one year with piecing together a used core and I haven’t looked back since. I have also now been buying mostly directly from Sonlight to save my self the hassle with purchasing as well. Sonlight finally allowed me to enjoy our time together and get myself out from behind the planning EVERYTHING to planning the extras (if any at all) instead.