Homeschooling with Sonlight: Books, Books and More Books
source: H is for Home
With our first week behind us, I’m excited to be officially homeschooling. It’s something I’ve looked forward to since Pumpkin Doodle was born, and it’s turning out to be as much fun as I hoped it would be! I’ll share some of our challenges and successes from the first week in another post, but I did want to tell you about the curriculum we’re using because I love it. In fact, I love it so much that I’ve owned it since before I was pregnant. I did home daycare at that time and used the curriculum with the kids I watched, and I’ve always been sure I wanted to use it with my girls as well.
The Sonlight curriculum is a literature- and history-rich program that is built around core read-alouds for each year. As someone who loves reading, history and cuddling with my girls, it feels like the perfect choice.
This year, we are using books from both Pre-K cores, as well as a ton of other books from our own collection, and we’ve added in appropriate levels of reading (Explode the Code), math (Singapore) and handwriting (Handwriting Without Tears) as well.
The Sonlight curriculum comes with a scheduled instructor’s guide (which we’re not using this year but I’m sure we will use in the later years), and while it is clearly a Christian company, they don’t shy away from good literature that might raise tough issues or difficult questions, which fits my philosophy perfectly. Even better, I’ve been a member of the Sonlight forums for over four years, and I’ve learned so much from the women there – about homeschooling and just about life in general. It’s an amazing community and one I’m proud to be part of!
This last week, we read the following books together, and all three girls sat mesmerized for the 30-45 minutes we read together each day. Precious times!
:: Mike Mulligan and More
:: Things People Do
:: Usborne Flip-Flap Body Book
:: Read-Aloud Bible Stories Vol. 4 (not a Sonlight title)
:: The Real Mother Goose
:: A Child’s Book of Art
There are so many different options out there, but for us, Sonlight feels like a good fit!
If you homeschool, what curriculum do you use? What do you love about your curriculum?
PS. I’m also sharing more about how I organize our homeschooling books, supplies, et cetera at Organizing Your Way today!
[...] shared on my personal blog a little bit about how and why we chose the curriculum we did, so I won’t go into that here, but I will tell you that it’s built around reading great [...]
We’re using Sonlight as well and I absolutely LOVE it!! I used the P3/4 Core last year and this year we’re moving on to the P4/5 Core. I am looking into starting the Explode the Code books as well and maybe even the preschool Handwriting Without Tears. I’m so excited to be starting this journey with my children! I’m planning to start in August.
I’m glad you had such a great first week. May they continue for the days ahead [smile].
I see that you link to Amazon frequently. Have you considered becoming a Sonlight affiliate?
~Luke
I, too, started with Sonlight with my oldest. I love, love, love to read! However, with my children’s spacing, I realized I was going to end up teaching more than one core… I transitioned to Tapestry of Grace to allow for teaching all the children together. It has also worked very well for us!
Karen’s last blog post..And they were going to throw out the box?!