Luke Holzman over at the Sonlight Blog wrote a post about how he learned less about history in his traditional school than he did in homeschool. That experience resonates with us. See here, here, and here. He talked about the Sonlight Core D & E Curricula that includes the Landmark History of the American People books. He is right and this is part of the reason we have been such big fans of Sonlight. They are awesome books and give a feel for history I have not seen anywhere else. Now if they could just kick that horrible Joy Hakim history curriculum to the curb and find a worthy replacement. It was less than useless for us.
Trisha
Is this the one you were telling me about that your kids LOVED in grade 3???
That is the one (two actually)!
Trisha
Cool… thanks for sharing!!
Thanks for sharing your experience! Glad I’m not the only one [smile].
As for Hakim–as I said last time–we’d love to improve our curriculum but haven’t found a worthy replacement yet. As my mom wrote in this last year’s catalog, Hakim’s works are some of the most fascinating histories she’s ever read… and she’s read a lot! And the Core 100 Instructor’s Guide is filled with notes to help get a more balanced perspective of history, making Hakim’s bias a jumping off point for excellent discussion and study. Granted, as you mentioned, it didn’t work for your family and you found it wanting (“less than useless” to be precise [smile]).
I don’t know if you passed along your suggestions last time… but I’ll send the books you mention over to product development to consider. Thanks!
~Luke
Hey Luke. You know we love you guys a lot! We bought 75% of our homeschool materials from you for seven of our eight homeschool years. Everything thing you have is so stellar (including the flexibility to chose between lots of good options in almost all cases but this one) it makes this glaring hole in the History curriculum more apparent. Even though what we did worked for us, we have no confidence that what we did will be good for other people. That is why we chose you guys–you are better at it than us. We just believe that other people should not have to suffer through the Joy Hakim stuff. I am glad your mother really liked it, but we thought her prose and histories were fundamentally less fascinating and well written than the program we cobbled together with A Patriot’s History of the United States and the REA CLEP preparation books. Of course we used your novels and other materials in conjunction with the rest of our history program.