We have been homeschooling for 5 years now and have used a handful of different curriculums. Today I want to introduce you to Sonlight. This has been our first year trying Sonlight. My goal is not necessarily to give it a rating, but rather tell you what sets it apart and how it may or may not be a good fit for your homeschool.
Sonlight is a literature based curriculum and, like many curriculums, each year has a particular time period/setting as it's base. It rotates around from ancient to modern times. You can check out their catalog or website for the exact rotations. Generally speaking you would cover the same time period (e.g. American History) two or more times if you used the curriculum every year. Each time the level of difficulty, of course, would increase. This is pretty typical of many history curriculums.
Literature based means that you and your kids will read a lot of books - mostly historical ones, with a few others thrown in. If you don't like historical fiction or non-fiction and prefer to read fantasy, fairy tales, or other classics you may have to adjust the curriculum or find a different one. I personally love the books - my kids tend to complain a bit. I don't think that is because of the quality of books - it's just they like to complain.
Sonlight is also a Christian curriculum. Included in the lesson plans are various aspects of Bible reading, prayer, & memorization. Having that already laid out for you could be a bonus. On the other hand, it is easy to omit or substitute something else you prefer.
Sonlight is a thoughtful curriculum as far as being age-appropriate. The parent read-alouds are generally a little more complex than your child could do on their own. The readers are on the easy side, I would say. Occasionally I had to find a more complex read for my advanced reader. They have a nice feature that allows you to use a different reading list for different grade/ability levels. For example, the Core we are doing has "regular" or "advanced". The cores are supposed to be flexible enough to cover a range of ages (e.g. 2nd, 3rd, or 4th grades). If your kids are further apart in age, you're not going to be able to combine them very easily. They'll have to do different cores in that situation. This brings me to the great thing about Sonlight and also the worst thing: you get to combine your kids for a large chunk of the day. This totally makes sense and I'm sure many, many homeschoolers do this. It does not work well in our family. I spend a lot of time correcting and asking them not to fight, giggle, touch each other, etc. Although separate curriculums is more time-consuming, it could be best for some families.
Some other features of Sonlight:
The language arts in the younger grades is integrated into the curriculum - meaning there is a 2 page handout for each week that you will copy as needed. I personally did not care for it, but I have trouble getting my kids to write anyway.
A 4 or 5 day schedule. The 5th day schedule is all optional. It includes things like supplemental history reading and an additional read-aloud. Alternately, you could use the 5th day for whatever else your family likes: art, crafting, going on field trips, cleaning the house...
One day each week has a poetry lesson.
Be warned: our history still had some textbook style read alouds. They were not very compelling. But the whole year is not textbook or you could substitute some of the readers in place of the textbook.
They have a lovely Timeline book with Timeline stickers for each year of the curriculum. Even if we don't use Sonlight next year, I'm still going to order the era-appropriate stickers.
Finally, I want to talk about how to buy Sonlight. Peruse their website or catalog for all the details, but here are some ideas.
1. Order the whole shootin' match. Boom! You're done for the year. You can select all subjects (like math, spelling, science, handwriting, and electives) besides the history core. They have recommendations for everything and they are pretty quality ones. At this level, you're spending a pretty penny, but it would save time and energy. Might be a good option if you live internationally too.
2. Order only the history core. With this you are getting the lesson plans and all the books pertaining to it - the readers, the read-alouds, the history texts, etc. Less expensive and a good option if you don't want to hassle with acquiring books from the public library or buying them yourself. And you'll be amassing a nice home library, if that appeals to you. If you don't have a public library handy, I would definitely suggest doing this. You'll then have to acquire all your other subjects like math, handwriting, science, & electives.
3. Order only the lesson plans for the history core and pick and choose a few other items. The most economical way to go. Good if you are pretty set on your math or other subjects besides history. This will take a little more time to implement because you'll be constantly checking out books from the library or buying used ones from Amazon. Occasionally there are rarer books that your library or Amazon may not carry. In that case, you could simply add those to your order or get really creative with interlibrary loan. Again, you will have to acquire all your other subjects.
