Lorena picked me up from work at 4PM today. We drove straight home, but did not get there until 4:40. That is traffic as usual in Portland. It was planned to be that way. This was just one more reminder of how badly Portland is managed and why so many companies are continue to leave.
Betty Blonde #328 – 10/19/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
De todas mis sobrinas Mexicanas pelirrojas, la Dayanita de San Francisco y del Tec de Monterrey es mi favorita por mucho. Su padre es el hermano mayor de Lorena (Mom) que se caso con Dayana mi concuña. Yo quiero a ella también, pero estoy medio sospechoso de que no quiere tanto (con razón, tal vez) a gringos y yo soy sumamente gringo aun que me gusta pensar que parezco un poco Mexicano. Pero eso es cuento de otro día.
Dejando eso para atrás, hoy quiero quejarme un poco con que tan mal me a tratado esta Mexicanilla tan hermosa y dulce. Quería que nos visitara la Dayanita este verano acá en Oregon, pero me dijo Lorena que Dayanita va a tomar una clase de psicología este verano y no puede viajar. Estoy triste y, la verdad, un poco decepcionado. Yo siempre había pensado que yo era el tío favorito de esa dulce niña, pero ahora tengo mis dudas también de ella como su mama. ¿Como es que ella no tiene tiempo por su tío favorito?
¿¿¡¿Dayanita, cuando nos vas a visitar?!?? ¡¡¡Hay un chorro de huercos acá que te quieren conocer!!!
Betty Blonde #327 – 10/16/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
It feels a little surreal to us that we derive such a high level of satisfaction from life within walking distance of virtually everything we need in a small apartment in the suburbs of Portland. I mentioned Lorena’s community garden spot ($28 $22–correction from Lorena–for a good little plot for the whole season, including the first tilling and all the water she needs). The produce to the left, a radish and some cilantro, are the first fruits of all her efforts. She chats daily with the other gardeners, mostly little old ladies and enjoys herself thoroughly.
She has started her next foray out into the community by getting her transcripts sent from all over the country to the local community college. She spoke with a lady from church who has been an administrator at the college for years and found the college has an office just a few blocks from our house. Lorena went there and the facility was really nice. She is not sure she will be able to take all the classes she needs to finish her degree in Wilsonville, but she will be able to get her academic advising done her.
We are certainly not in an always and forever living situation in the little apartment–at least we think we are not–but we certainly are enjoying it for now.
Update: Corrected one more time. Lorena sends this note along: “La verdad, hay señoras jóvenes con niños chiquitos u mujeres de mi edad. Pero las las viejitas son las más amables.”
Betty Blonde #326 – 10/15/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
This post was submitted to Sonlight (the homeschool curricula people) as part of their call for “It Was Worth It” stories. Homeschooling was absolutely worth it, essential even, so this fit us to a tee. If Sonlight accept my entry, I will post a link to it here.
Mothers are the primary educators in most homeschools in America today by a wide margin. That made our homeschool a little bit out of the norm. I, the father, performed the daily planning, one-on-one teaching, homework correcting, reading aloud, practicing of spelling and everything else that had to do with the academic elements of our family homeschool. Of course Mom did all the hard work–driving to lessons, practices and a million other events in addition to maintaining the household while I worked a day job. Our reality, though was that I am the only member of the family who had no misgivings at any time whatsoever about whether we should homeschool. I had plenty of misgivings about how well we were doing, but that we should homeschool our children was something I never questioned. The whole family is grateful for our decision to stick it out in our homeschooling.
Why and How We Homeschooled
We have two children about eighteen months apart in age. We homeschooled Kelly, our oldest in the first grade just because there was no regulatory reason to put her in school and we wanted to have that extra year with her in the house. It was a great experience. Kelly got way ahead academically. The problem was that we tried to followed a well-known book on Classical Education that called for the parents to cover material following a specific pattern that was excellent in terms of pedagogical methods and content but left daily planning and the finding of materials to the parent. We rapidly found the search for materials and creation of daily plans was sufficiently time consuming that it was hard to do justice to the teaching, too. We think we did well, but we were completely burned out by the end of that first year.
The next year we put Kelly into the local government school because we knew we could not maintain the frenetic pace required to teach the kids well with the methods we used in that first attempt at homeschooling. Our son Christian did not want to be left out, so we put him into kindergarten at the same school as Kelly. That actually did not go badly, but we changed school districts after a couple of years and found ourselves in a situation where neither the moral nor the academic standards of the school aligned with what we wanted for the kids. Worse, we saw their spirits start to harden. So we decided we would try homeschooling again. We knew we would have to find another way. We had the will to homeschool, but we knew we would burn out if we did all the planning, bit-by-bit purchasing and teaching the same way we did it previously.
We looked at a lot of programs, but found what we needed in the Sonlight Core homeschool programs. We were able to replace the bulk of the rewarding, but time consuming day to day planning and purchasing with about a two week summer activity. In one fell swoop, we could buy detailed daily lesson plans and ninety percent of the materials we needed to operate our school for the entire year. It is hard to sufficiently emphasize the importance of this to our homeschool. We loved homeschooling from the very beginning, but there is no way we could have returned to it had we not had these materials and lesson plans. We were now freed up to spend the bulk of our time with the kids, teaching.
Was It Worth It? — Time With the Kids
In looking back, the time we spent with our kids was the single greatest contributor to the success of our homeschool. Within weeks after we returned to the homeschool, the kids became more optimistic and their spirits softened. We read, drew, played, traveled, skied, shopped and did so many other things together that would never have been possible had we not homeschooled. We went to museums, plays, parks and made trips to visit family in Mexico during the school year that would never have been possible had we not homeschooled. Most of all we talked and talked and talked about virtually everything under the sun in a way that was natural and not forced due to lack of time. We do believe in that old adage that, when it comes to children, quality time is quantity time.
Was It Worth It? — Academics
We have no illusions that any of us are particularly gifted intellectually, but the one-on-one time that homeschooling allowed, provided us with a modicum of academic success. When we started, we wanted the kids to get an education at least as good as that provided by a reasonably good traditional school. It became evident fairly soon that there are some fairly amazing academic advantages to homeschool. We generally got started pretty early in the morning, so Kelly and Christian would watch the other neighborhood kids line up for the school bus while they were already doing their daily homeschool work. They would still be at it when the kids got off the school bus in the afternoon. They had more time to complete more material more deeply than the traditional school kids.
There is much that has been written about the ability of homeschools to both tailor the learning for each individual child and provide one-on-one tutoring whenever it is needed. Add to that the enthusiasm a parent uniquely has for the education of their own children and the advantage is multiplied. For our kids these advantages manifested themselves as high levels of performance on nationally normed standardized tests. The kids took the ACT every year as a matter of North Carolina homeschool law. They did well enough on the ACT that we were able to start Kelly in the local community college full time after the tenth grade. She already had over a year of college credit from CLEP tests she had taken previously. Christian did not want to be left at home alone and he did well enough on the ACT, that we were able to start him full time at the community college after the eighth grade.
People ask us whether the kids were ready for college at such a young age–Kelly, with her CLEP credits skipped three and a half years of high school and Christian skipped all of high school. We were a little worried they might not be able to handle the social environment at the community college or at North Carolina State University where they entered two years later as academic Juniors. Our fears were unfounded. The uniquely powerful socialization that occurs in an active and engaged homeschooling family allowed them to fit right in. Kelly graduated Magna Cum Laude at age 20 from NCSU with a Bachelors degree in Statistics. She is now in a fully funded Marketing PhD program at University of Washington. Christian graduated Summa Cum Laude from NCSU at age 18 with an honors degree in Applied Mathematics. He is now a Fellow of the Fulton School of Engineering studying for a PhD in Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University with funded research from MIT Lincoln Labs.
Homeschool is all about training up a child in the way he should go and it was absolutely worth it.
Betty Blonde #325 – 10/14/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
I am on the same page as Dennis Foley in his article at the Intellectual Takeout website titled Render Unto Caesar? He starts off by saying, “I’ve seen it coming for many years.” He believes oppression is coming for Christians. I have seen it, too. My college age daughter and I discussed this very thing last night. A group of “friends” who purport to be Christian ridiculed her for a position she took that is fundamental to Christian belief. This is all part of the reason we decided to homeschool our children eleven years ago. Foley describes an event where the governor of a state blames Christianity for the ills of our society and suggests that religion (Christianity really) and the religious should be suppressed. Foley describes it so well, I am just going to post a starting quote and recommend a read of the whole article.
The threat appears regularly in the comments on our social media pages. The first time you learn that passing your faith on to your children is considered a form of child abuse, you’re taken aback. But then the allegation is repeated over and over and over again. The first time you see talk of “stamping out the virus of religion,” you wonder what that means. But then you learn what it means for some when another commenter nonchalantly recommends going into the churches, slitting the priests’ throats, and finally getting on with the evolution of society.
Such anti-religious (typically, anti-Christian) attitudes as are now spreading like wildfire through social media. Similar sentiments played out horrifically in the French Revolution, the Marxist purges in Eastern Europe and China, the Cristero War in Mexico, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the ongoing slaughter of Christians in the Middle East and Africa. Is it unreasonable to wonder if and how the virulent, anti-Christian attitudes of today will be unleashed in America?
Betty Blonde #324 – 10/13/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Some of you might know I am not, to say the very least, a fan of yoga. I feel the same way about hypnosis. Yoga is inextricably tied to Hinduism and altered states of spiritual consciousness. All Hindus are enjoined to practice yoga to achieve that very end. Hypnotism arrived to the scene much later than yoga and Hinduism, but is informed by it and it can be argued that the roots of hypnosis are in yoga and or yoga-like trance states (see here). There is no place for yoga in Christianity and no place for Christianity in yoga. Here is an article on the subject from one of the Hindu sects titled There is no Christian Yoga. The author of the article displays monumental ignorance on the subject of Christianity by erecting a Christian straw man against which to argue, but gets that one thing right: yoga is not Christian even if some left-wing churches try to co-opt it. Yoga belongs to Hinduism (and maybe Buddhism and Jainism). Hypnosis with its states of altered consciousness, like yoga, is neither benign nor Christian.
Betty Blonde #323 – 10/12/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
We miss our kids a lot now that they are off at college. Still, there is a big upside to this empty-nester thing. Today, Lorena and I got up late, walked to breakfast at a nice little restaurant about half a block from our apartment. Then, this afternoon, we walked three or four blocks down to Jimmy John’s. Both time we had a leisurely meal. We have not had that luxury for years and years. We had to inhale our food and run off to a library, bookstore or laboratory as fast as possible because there was always a deadline.
Corollary to that is our apartment. We went from a big place on a big lot to a studio apartment with just barely enough stuff to get by. This might not last forever, but we are enjoying the latter. A lot. There are no lawns to mow, few windows, plates, floor and counters to wash, no equipment to maintain. It is fabulous to sit and look out our window at the most beautiful trees in existence, Douglas Fir along with the rest of the greener than anyplace else greenery in Oregon.
We know we are going to have to do something else before too long, but Lorena are very much enjoying the quiet, the communion with old friends, family and each other for now. It has reduced our urgency to do anything that might tie us down too much to do the “smelling of the roses” we are currently enjoying.
Betty Blonde #322 – 10/09/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
You might have noticed by now that I have changed the blog theme. I really did not want to do it, but someone was able to replace some of our blog links with some pretty unsavory stuff. I do not have a new header image yet, but it was about time for something new anyway. I hope to get to that soon. I have wondered whether I should keep blogging now that the kids have graduated and left home. Sometimes I struggle to find something meaningful about which to write, but sometimes I feel pretty inspired. I am playing it by ear right now, but it is just part of my daily routine now, so my sense is that I will just keep going.
On another note, a blogging buddy has asked me to submit something on our homeschool for an upcoming e-book they will publish. I have decided that would be pretty fun, so I am going to do it. I will keep you posted on that as it moves forward.
Betty Blonde #321 – 10/08/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
This post is part of a narrative history of our homeschool. It is about why we chose to homeschool, what we did and how we did it. It is about our failures and frustrations as well as our successes. The plan is to make an honest accounting of it all for the benefit of ourselves and others. This is a work in progress which was started in late October 2014 after the kids had already skipped most or all of high school, Christian had earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude), Kelly had earned a Bachelors degree in Statistics (Magna Cum Laude) and they were ensconced in funded PhD programs on the West Coast. I add to the narrative as I have time.
The choice to base the history and literature portions of our homeschool academic program on Sonlight was a big one. The instructor guides gave us a daily organizational framework which helped a lot. Our next dilemma, though, was even more difficult: How could we manage the kids to assure the work was done properly while the principle teacher was working a full-time job. We were very worried about this aspect of our personal circumstances, but it turned into a huge benefit. The short explanation is that I made a detailed list of work the kids needed to do each day, Lorena assured the kids kept working on it until it was complete, I corrected their work when I returned home from my job each day and, finally, the kids and I would sit down together for anywhere between one and, in the extremely rare case four hours to read aloud, work on spelling, describe a math concept they did not understand and all those sorts of things.
I will include a couple of examples of the spreadsheets I put together for the kids in the next post in the series. They were fairly detailed, but also quite concise. Our fear was that Lorena would have to hover over them like a hawk to assure they got everything done. It turned out that was not necessary at all. The kids knew I would look at their work as soon as I got home and that very fact motivated them in a good way–they knew I would be pleased and rave a little if they did well. There was an added benefit that the kids became self-reliant learners. They knew exactly what they were supposed to do and their expectation was that they could do the work on their own. That served them very well when they went to college. They expected to figure stuff out for themselves. They also knew they would not get in trouble if they got stuff wrong so long as they made a good faith effort to do the work. They knew we would revisit the material and adjust our methods until they owned the knowledge so they could move on with confidence.
The single greatest contributor to the success of our homeschool is the time the kids and I spent together in the evenings, correcting materials, practicing spelling and math problems, drawing and, all the time, talking and talking and talking. I knew when and where the kids struggled because I not only corrected their work, but talked to them about what they did and how they did it. I always quizzed them on what they thought the did not know in addition to what they did know. Sometimes all they could tell me was that they did not get the material, but then we would work together to find something that actually worked to get the hard concept across. Co-opting the kids in the decisions was huge. What do you want to do for art? (Learn how to draw realistic faces?) and similar kinds of questions were a huge element in the success of the program.
Finally, we often made hand-written corrections, usually small ones, to the work required for subsequent, already planned days. If more time was need, if the material was stuff they already knew, if there was a big event (blueberry picking, a corn maze, etc.) that diminished the time available to complete all the work, we made real-time, on the spot adjustments.
[Previous] [Next].
Betty Blonde #320 – 10/07/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Lorena and Christian went down to Ikea and bought a new, muchly needed dresser yesterday. It would have been a very sad visit to Tempe if there was not at least one piece of new furniture involved, so I think Lorena met all of her goals. It was classically Lorena. When I asked how the visit went, she gave me a list of the level of cleanliness and orderliness of each of the Christian’s rooms and all of his clothes.
Lorena is scheduled to arrive in Portland later this evening. I can certainly testify to the fact that she has her work cut out for her in our apartment after a week of my living as a bachelor with the twin cat sisters. I will clean up the apartment, but no matter how good I think I have it, she will be (rightly) disappointed. She is cleaning machine. Life is profoundly more excellent when she is here than when she is away.
When she gets back, she is scheduled to meet with the local college to make plans to take some classes. She is very close to finishing. Thinking back with the homeschool, work, moves, kids and all that, it is really amazing she has been able to make continued progress toward her degree. Our friends Troy G. (PhD), John H. (BSME) and Daniel H. (AS) all graduated this fall after long hard stints in school. It is impressive and inspiring and makes me want to try to encourage others to start or just keep going because when you have a degree, your life is enriched. And not just economically.
Betty Blonde #319 – 10/06/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Kelly came down from Seattle for a weekend of homework with Dad. She has not even been gone a year yet and it seems like it has been forever. From the time the kids entered Community College five years ago until they left home last summer we spent at least half of our weekends at the library studying. When the kids were at Wake Technical Community College, we usually went to the Hill Library at NCSU. Then, when the fabulous new Hunt Library was completed shortly after the kids entered NCSU their Junior year, we went there.
So, I have to admit I got a little nostalgic. We listened to Enya and classical music while Kelly did literature reviews and I worked on my latest programming project. I hope to be able to do it again soon, but this time maybe it will be up in Seattle.
Betty Blonde #318 – 10/05/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
I talk with my cousin and favorite government school teacher, Trisha, regularly on the subject of pedagogy and traditional school politics. There is always drama and it is always interesting. Her current school leadership makes her situation way more interesting than it should be. It sounds like the school board is on top of it and is in the process of fixing some pretty serious stuff, but it takes way longer than it should and the kids and classroom teachers are the ones who suffer. Much emotional and bureaucratic effort is unnecessarily wasted on this drama that takes time from the teaching of the kids.
At any rate, Trisha got a highly deserved teaching award the other day (see the cool picture of the apple trophy). Her students regularly outperform their peers on standardized tests. Part of this is a result of Trisha’s hard work to find appropriate methods for each particular student and situation. She really knows how to teach the kids. Her biggest challenge in doing her job is the demands placed on her by government regulation, school management and by disruptive students in the classroom. It is interesting that the school board appears to be very much on her side, but through no fault of their own–again because of government restrictions–have to move at a glacial pace to fix bad stuff.
This was all in my mind when I read about a letter to the editor written by a parent in Seattle that was linked on the Sonlight blog. The author of the letter really nailed it with something that, in our experience, is very true. Schools have successfully taught math in some parts of the world for many years. The idea is to find the methods that work so well in these places and use them. That is precisely what we tried to do in our homeschool with some level of success, especially in Math. Here is the well stated salient point from the letter:
Math has been taught to children at least since ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, and those kids grew up to use their mathematical skills to build the Parthenon, aqueducts and pyramids, which are still standing. The math taught in K-12 hasn’t really changed much since Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton invented calculus in the 1600s, so one would think that educators have had enough time to figure out how to teach it.
How about if educators stop experimenting with our kids, adopt whatever approach the Finnish or Singapore schools use, and get on with it?
Betty Blonde #317 – 10/02/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
It is early in the day and you can see in the picture that Lorena is already hitting the sauce. Christian turned in his last project for the semester yesterday so all he has on his schedule today is a haircut and a trip out to one of our church conventions in Casa Grande. They are having way too much fun.
This summer will be an all research all the time summer in the Tempe heat. I think Christian is really looking forward to it. His research is still in the mathematical theory stage, so there is not a lot of lab work yet. I am not sure there will be very much lab work with his current direction, but that direction will almost certainly change toward the specifics of his dissertation as soon as his paper is delivered in November.
Betty Blonde #316 – 10/01/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
The first thing odd thing Lorena noticed in her current visit to Tempe to see Christian was the very loud clacking that occurred when he typed on his keyboard. He types pretty fast so there was a continuous racket. It turns out he had bought one of the 10-ton (seemingly) boat anchor type old 1980’s IBM Model M keyboards for $30 on eBay. People who follow this kind of thing or lived in that era will know that about which I speak and why it is hilarious.
Betty Blonde #315 – 09/30/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Lorena is going to visit Christian for a week, so I am a bachelor for a week unless Kelly comes for a visit. I have my fingers crossed.
Betty Blonde #314 – 09/29/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Lorena is scheduled to fly to Arizona to visit Christian for a week so she bought a bunch of fruit and set it beside the juicer so I will take the hint to eat a healthier diet. She has been juicing up a storm ever since we got the industrial strength slow speed juicer. The thing can even make stuff like peanut butter and pasta. I have to do something I am just entirely too chunky right now even though I am down about ten pounds.
Lorena makes juice out of citrus stuff combined with celery, beets, kale, cucumbers, parsley, spinach, ginger, carrots and anything else she sees at the grocery store. She loves it. Her juices, especially that ones that beets in them look quite interesting. I might have to take the plunge while she is gone. An added benefit is that the cats want nothing to do with the stuff.
Betty Blonde #313 – 09/28/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
It is a beautiful spring day in Oregon. This is the view from the desk in my apartment. It is only a parking lot and it is amazing how much we enjoy the trees, hill and comings and goings we see from our window. Interesting things are happening all around with no certain end. Not only with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah in their current state of mind and body, but with work, our family in Mexico and with our kids off at college. It is nice to have a quiet place to sit and consider it all quietly. I think my reflective mood was influenced by the fact that my daily bible reading today was Romans 12.
Betty Blonde #312 – 09/27/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Lorena went to Johnston Community College in Smithfield, North Carolina for one semester. She needed to get her transcripts sent from the four community colleges she attended to the one where she hopes to enroll in the fall in Oregon. After a little of the “interesting” style of service that is typical to the Portland area, we received the following note from Johnston Community College. We were reminded again of the tremendous refinement in large swaths of the native population in North Carolina and arguably the entire South. Not only did they do something they were not required to do that cost them some money to help us out, they admonished us and thanked us (I guess, for heeding the admonishment?). I will never not love North Carolina.
Betty Blonde #311 – 09/25/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
This post is part of a narrative history of our homeschool. It is about why we chose to homeschool, what we did and how we did it. It is about our failures and frustrations as well as our successes. The plan is to make an honest accounting of it all for the benefit of ourselves and others. This is a work in progress which was started in late October 2014 after the kids had already skipped most or all of high school, Christian had earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude), Kelly had earned a Bachelors degree in Statistics (Magna Cum Laude) and they were ensconced in funded PhD programs on the West Coast. I add to the narrative as I have time.
In most homeschools, the mother is the main teacher. Our homeschool was different than most homeschools in that Lorena (the mom) was the principal caregiver for the kids, but I (the dad) was the teacher/planner. Lorena worked as a stay-at-home mom while I held a full-time job as an engineer over the entire course of our homeschool. How we balanced our circumstances to make the homeschool work and why we chose the Sonlight homeschool curricula is the subject of this section of the series.
The first year of homeschool when Kelly was in first grade and Christian was learning to read at age four was pretty chaotic because we followed Susan Wise Bauer’s excellent Well Trained Mind book to do our home school. You can read about that here. The problem was not the system itself. That was excellent. The problem was that more time was needed to prepare study plans and accumulate materials than we had available to the extent that we had much less time to devote to actually teaching the kids.
Classical Education
We decided we needed to do something else so we started to look around. We knew we liked many aspects of “Classical Education” due to our experience with the methods described in The Well Trained Mind, but beside the logistics reasons previously stated, we had some additional reservations. It had to do with what appeared to be the focus of many of those invested in Classical Christian Education: the training of lawyers and arguers. Around our house we called it the Patrick Henry College effect where the focus is on a rhetoric and preparation for arguing and confronting. I talk about this in more detail in a blog post titled What influence will homeschoolers have in the near future. We identified this very closely with a category of homeschoolers who talked big about “doing hard things,” then went on to get soft degrees in things like Communications, Political Science, Government, History and the like.
I will talk about this in more depth further on, but we knew from the very beginning we wanted our kids to do something hard with their undergraduate degrees, then go on to their vocation after that. We believed then and still believe now that even if a person’s vocation is a fine one in the practice of Law, History, Sociology (Rodney Stark is one of our heroes) or some other soft area, degrees in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Statistics or even Engineering form a strong foundation for that. A student might have to carefully tailor their elective courses to accommodate further study in the softer areas of Business, Law, History, etc., but that is not such a difficult thing to accomplish.
I absolutely believe it is possible to do it the other way around, using electives to fill in the History degree with hard Math classes, but our perspective has been that it is easier to get into a good graduate program in Business with an undergraduate Math or Statistics degree than to get into a graduate Math program with an undergraduate Sociology degree. A corollary to this is that Math/Physics majors do better on the LSAT (Law School Application Test) than any other major–see here and here. Pre-law, History, English and Political Science are way down the list.
The thing we liked about The Well Trained Mind’s approach to Classical Education was the framework it provided. We really believe there is something to the idea of the Trivium–Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric, each one in its right time. In addition, the coordinating of the study of History and Literature was phenomenal as was the passing through the History of the World multiple time with increasing levels of difficulty. This all served us well.
We choose the Sonlight curriculum
In the end we chose the Sonlight program. We stuck almost exclusively with Sonlight materials for the first year and tapered off gradually until we used Sonlight for about half of our materials the year before the kids started college. We think the program is wonderful and have no regrets for having made that choice. We liked it for a lot of reasons that I have described in this series and throughout this blog. Probably the best way to lay it out is with a list, so here it is:
We bought the entire core program, books, materials and all from Sonlight. The materials arrived each year in cardboard cartons that we absolutely loved to open and inspect. We had to firmly admonish the kids to NOT read the books until their due time or we would have had a pretty short school year. We have absolutely no regrets about this choice even though we thought there were a couple of areas in the program that were very, very weak in the later years. I write about that here. Those parts were the exception and not the rule. We know there are other great homeschool programs out there, but this is what we chose and we are glad for it.
Betty Blonde #310 – 09/24/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén
