Tag: Sonlight

Homeschool program uses “A Patriot’s History of the United States”

On Friday, May 29, 2015

We used A Patriot’s History of the United States as our principle text for the study of U.S. History during homeschool. We had not planned to do that, but needed something after we were sorely disappointed by our experience with Joy Hakim’s politically correct and simplistic A History of the US provided by the Sonlight program. This was the one glaring weakness in what we feel is a stellar homeschool offering. Hakim’s screeds were just a bridge too far in terms of both focus and dumbed down content. Hakim’s highest earned degree is a Masters degree. Her undergraduate degree was in Government and I could not find the area of her Masters degree so who knows whether she has any formal training in History.

Two profoundly more knowledgeable, professional historians wrote the New York Times #1 best selling A Patriot’s History of the United States. Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen are both college History professors with long lists of refereed journal articles in their curriculum vitae. The book was more readable, less agenda-driven and covered U.S. History more deeply and broadly than the Hakim books. I found an article on a talk given by Larry Schweikart about the book. The article featured a photograph of four homeschoolers who used his book as a text for their homeschool study of U.S. History and were impressed enough with the book they wanted to come hear the author speak. It is nice to know we are not the only homeschoolers that used this book. We have hope Sonlight will eventually see the light on this and make the switch, but it has been several years since we raised the issue.

Betty Blonde #332 – 10/23/2009

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It Was Worth It

By Dad

On Tuesday, May 19, 2015

In Education, Homeschool

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.

Kelly and Christian NCSU graduation
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

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Homeschool, Sonlight, and long term goals

By Dad

On Wednesday, January 1, 2014

In Education, Homeschool

Day 863 of 1000
Betty Blonde #29 – 08/26/2008

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There are only 137 days left in our 1000 day count. The idea of the count was to track the last days leading up to Kelly and Christian’s graduation from NCSU as the culmination of our second start at homeschooling in the Fall of 2004. We are still on track. The start of this blog coincided with that restart of our homeschool after a three year hiatus during which Kelly and Christian attend government schools in Oregon. The restart was for Kelly’s fifth grade and Christian’s third grade years. I thought I would take a few minutes on this New Year’s Day 2014 to reflect a little about our goals when we started homeschool and where we think we are relative to those very earliest ideas about what we thought we might accomplish.

What we thought we might be able to do when we started

I had a year of homeschool experience behind me when we started up again in 2004. I tried to put together my own homeschool schedule and curricula from scratch during that first pass. It was a great year and we accomplished a lot, but it was WAY to much work for a dad with a day job to accomplish well. I found that curriculum development, materials searches, and all those other things required to do a “from scratch” program was a bridge too far. So, for the second pass, I knew that my focus needed to be on teaching, correcting, planning, and the day to day operation rather than all the effort required to develop and deploy a curriculum for each kid on my own, too.

How did we set our goals?

We set some long term goals very early in the process. I would like to say that it was on purpose, but it really was not. It was an outgrowth of how we did our homeschool planning. We based our homeschool program around the yearly plans provided by Sonlight with the normal customizations most homeschool families make to meet the unique needs of their children. I worked from the Sonlight materials to plan one or two weeks at a time. It usually took me an hour or two on a weekend to figure out what I wanted the kids to do for each week. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and I involved the kids in the process.

From the very beginning, I liked to look ahead at the programs for future years. It dawned on me pretty early in the first year that, if we followed the plan, the kids would not have to be rocket scientists to start college a couple of years early. That became our goal. We wanted the kids to start a hard degree at a community college after their sophomore year in high school. The degree had to be a hard degree in something like math, statistics, engineering, or physics because that would give them a better chance at getting a good job. We wanted them to start at a community college so they could stay at home and pay low tuition. We wanted them to go to a Big State University after the finished community college for the same reasons.

How did we stay on track?

The amazing thing is that we did almost nothing to stay on track other than follow those Sonlight based curriculum guides. We added ideas of our own, and then we just arrived. The few things we added, like the use of CLEP preparation and testing I have written about so much in this blog pushed us even further ahead. We signed Kelly up to start at our local community college after her sophomore year and through a fun and interesting, but hectic set of events, signed Christian up at the same time so he ended up completely skipping high school rather than just skipping the last two years. I guess the best advice I have on this is to make a reasonable plan and stick to it.

So where are we now?

Kelly and Christian are both on track to graduate from NCSU this Spring with degrees in Statistics and Applied Mathematics (respectively). We do not have any illusion that any of us are geniuses, but they have both been on the Dean’s list every semester for which they have been eligible. Both have applied to graduate schools on the West Coast. We are not sure they will get in, but they will certainly be prepared to enter the workforce. It was the plan and sticking to it that got them where they are.

Sonlight Homeschool Curricula (Part 4): History

By Dad

On Thursday, May 2, 2013

In Education, Homeschool

Day 619 of 1000

This is the fourth in a series of articles about why we used Sonlight Curricula in our homeschool. Here is a page that holds an introduction to the series and links to the other posts in the series. We bought core packages for what would be third through tenth grades in a traditional school. Kelly used the program from fifth through tenth grade. Christian used the program from third through eighth grade. This series mostly describes what we did for all the subject areas except math, music, and art. I have already written pretty extensively on this blog about what we did for math and plan to do a future series on our art art program. We bought most, but not all of our core materials from Sonlight and followed their curriculum guides with a fair amount of rigor. Like most other homeschoolers, we deviated in minor ways where we saw fit.

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I have written what I have to write about the Sonlight history program in other places so this will be a brief overview of how it served us and a link or two to the posts that go into more detail. In a nutshell, there were some things we absolutely loved about how Sonlight handles history, but there was one part of the program-the Joy Hakim series for US History–we found totally unsuitable for our needs both in terms of the quality and depth of the history coverage. We made the mistake of buying the stuff that did not work for us before we sufficiently checked it out because our previous experience with the Sonlight History curricula had been so stellar.

In a nutshell, the things we really liked about the History program is that the Literature and History books and study guides are so will coordinated with each other. As mentioned above, we started back into homeschool when one of our children entered third grade and the other entered fifth grade. The curriculum we picked for the third grader featured The Land Mark History of the American People Volume I. I started reading it aloud to Christian, our third grader, but after the first chapter, it was so excellent, we started over so we could include our fifth grader in the reading even though she was working her way through the equivalent of what I think is now called the Eastern Hemisphere.

So in the final analysis, we highly recommend the first two-year pass through US History called Introduction to American History I and II. We loved the wonderful one year pass through the Eastern Hemisphere and the two year survey of World History I and II. We strongly recommend skipping the one year American History in Depth. We used the provided Literature books, but found something to replace the Joy Hakim books with what we believe was a much better written, more in-depth, interesting, and honest account of American History. The adjustments were required to allow us to better prepare our children to study History in college. We write more about our thinking on this material here, here, here and here.

Sonlight Homeschool Curricula (Part 2): Why we thought it would be good for us before we knew much about it

By Dad

On Monday, April 29, 2013

In Education, Homeschool

Day 616 of 1000

This is the second in a series of articles about why we used Sonlight Curricula in our homeschool. Here is a page that holds an introduction to the series and links to the other posts in the series. We bought core packages for what would be third through tenth grades in a traditional school. Kelly used the program from fifth through tenth grade. Christian used the program from third through eighth grade. This series mostly describes what we did for all the subject areas except math, music, and art. I have already written pretty extensively on this blog about what we did for math and plan to do a future series on our art art program. We bought most, but not all of our core materials from Sonlight and followed their curriculum guides with a fair amount of rigor. Like most other homeschoolers, we deviated in minor ways where we saw fit.

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There were six main reasons we chose Sonlight rather than the many other available homeschool curricula. They were the following:

The quality and number of the books
The coordinated curricula for Literature and History
The choice of Math options
The very helpful and comprehensize instructor guides
Sonlight’s very helpful web page on Reasons NOT to Buy Sonlight
The price

This post is about why we chose Sonlight before we knew much about it other than what we read on forums and Sonlight’s on web pages. We will address how we felt about the curricula after we had used it for awhile in later posts, so will confine the discussion in this post to the six items we felt justified the original purchase of two sets of Sonlight for third and fifth grade. You will notice that I have left some pretty important elements of a well-rounded curricula out of my list, things like science, art, and music. That will become more clear in future posts on science and the arts.

Books and reading were important elements of our family life from the time our children were old enough to understand. We easily spent an hour a day reading books such as the Homer Price, Henry Reed, and Laura Ingalls Wilder series. I do not think that is uncommon among families who value education (not just homeschool families). The fact that Sonlight’s curricula were so strongly based in the reading of great literature and history was what made their programs so attractive to us. We recognized a lot of the books in the curriculum lists, but there were a lot we did not recognize. Some of the ones we did not recognize had great reviews.

This reason was entirely vindicated with one of the earliest books we read aloud together, The Witch of Blackbird Pond. For the most part, there were enough books with each program that the kids had plenty to fulfill their reading addiction. We added a book or two not in the program on a fairly regular basis, but the Sonlight books formed the core of our reading material. We had a few quibbles after that, but on the whole, the quality and quantity of the literature books remained a constant during all six years we used Sonlight curricula with the exception of the abysmal Joy Hakim History series,

We loved that the Literature and History were coordinated. It just made sense. The first history book read aloud together was The Landmark History of the American People Volume I. It was an amazing history book, particularly well suited for the age of the children for which it was selected. We could hardly wait to get to Volume II. We did not know the History and Literature fit so well together at the time we bought the program the first time, but we quickly saw the excellent way those programs had been put together for the early years. Of course that fell apart when we got to the Joy Hakim series.

Math is also a big deal for our family. Before we looked at the Sonlight curricula, we investigated math curricula. We decided we liked Singapore Math for third and fifth grades. Sonlight carried Singapore and they also carried Saxon Math, our second choice. Sonlight chose to provide other math programs rather than develop their own. I think that was a wise decision. Their strength seems to be in Reading, Writing, History, and Literature. There are a lot of good math programs and Sonlight provides a choice. I checked around for pricing and we ended up buying our math curricula from Sonlight because they had great pricing. I have written about math curricula previously, but plan to do an additional series on our entire math trajectory as our kids both ended up in Math oriented degrees in college.

When we started back into homeschool with children in third and fifth grades, we wanted to assure we covered all the basic. We did not want our children to get behind their government and private school peers. We quickly found that was the last thing we needed to worry about. Still, the fact that Sonlight had extensive, easy to follow, day-by-day, study guides that gave us confidence we were covering everything they needed for a well-rounded, academically acceptable education was a huge help in allaying these fears. As we got more experience over the years, we changed things around a lot to meet the needs of our kids, but we always started with the instructor guides as a base around which to form our daily study plans.

How we taught our kids exactly why we believe what we believe was an important consideration in choosing curricula. Sonlight has a page on their site titled Reason’s NOT to Buy Sonlight that addresses their philosophy in this area quite well. Our entire school program was informed by our Christianity. That being said, we wanted our children to know as much as possible about different types of religions, non-religion, and even different types of Christianity. I think Sonlight has tried to strike a balance between their obvious Christian beliefs and the need to introduce children to the non-Christian reality of much of the world. In addition, some of the values represented in the books in the program written from a Christian worldview, did not really match too closely with our view of Christianity. Nevertheless, Sonlight was very upfront about this and, I believe very thoughtful in how they had put their program together. There were no suprises and we wanted our children to learn about differing Christian worldviews as well as non-Christian worldviews. Sonlight did a good job of presenting them all.

Our final issue was the cost of the program. When we decided to homeschool, we decided to, within our means, spend whatever it took to educate our children. Sonlight was a very big purchase decision for us. It was not as much as a car or a house, but, in terms of our means at the time, it was very expensive. In terms of the value of the packages with respect to other programs and the level of education our children received, we believe it was absolutely stellar. We do not think we could have gotten a better value anywhere else, especially considering how much planning time is required when a program does not have such good planning guides. That is why we have recommended it so highly inspite of a some minor quibbles and one or two major quibbles.

Luke at Sonlight experiences homeschool disconnect in his class

By Dad

On Wednesday, November 16, 2011

In Education, Homeschool

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.

Sonlight Homeschool Curricula (Part 1): Why we did not continue with Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well Trained Mind

By Dad

On Saturday, October 1, 2011

In Education, Homeschool

This is the first in a series of articles about why we used Sonlight Curricula in our homeschool. Here is a page that holds a description of the series and links to the other posts in the series. We bought core packages for what would be third through tenth grades in a traditional school. Kelly used the program from fifth through tenth grade. Christian used the program from third through eighth grade. This series mostly describes what we did for all the subject areas except math, music, and art. I have already written pretty extensively on this blog about what we did for math and plan to do a future series on our art art program. We bought most, but not all of our core materials from Sonlight and followed their curriculum guides with a fair amount of rigor. Like most other homeschoolers, we deviated in minor ways where we saw fit.

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About half of the books you see in the mess in the picture below came from Sonlight. We are very thankful we used their curriculum programs as a base for our homeschool for every year we homeschooled after the first grade. Kelly started out at a neighborhood Christian kindergarten. We started homeschool the year after that with programs we put together ourselves. We used Explode the Code to teach Christian how to read when he was four. I read a wonderful book titled, The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer that formed the basis for Kelly’s first grade year. Its precepts heavily influenced all our seven homeschool years. I have two rubs against the book that pushed me toward prepackaged curricula: 1) The author seems to be supremely well equipped to talk about history, literature, and the social sciences, but very much less qualified to talk about math and the hard sciences. 2) The methods proposed in the book require an incredible amount of work with respect to material selection and daily study planning. Nevertheless, that is what we did with Kelly in the first grade. It worked superbly for us both in terms of the joy we derived from the day to day work and the academic results.

The Library Wing of Our Bonus Room – Homeschool Materials

All was well, but we decided to put the kids in government school when Christian was in kindergarten and Kelly was in the second grade. The reason was that my job did not allow for sufficient time to prepare, let alone deliver according to the methods and materials Susan Wise Bauer so effectively described in her guide book. The schools the kids attended in Sherwood, Oregon were really pretty good. They stagnated a little academically, but made a few friends and enjoyed themselves very much.

We moved to Albany, Oregon at the beginning of Kelly’s fourth and Christian’s second grade years. We are very thankful to the government schools in Albany because they shocked us out of our lethargy and motivated us to return our kids to homeschool. The teachers, the teacher’s aides, the principal, the school lunches, and just about everything else about those schools was bad for our kids in just about every way. Our experience suggests that government schools are a bad places to “socialize” children. Our kid’s spirits got harder and more aggressive and their academics suffered greatly. The teachers’ disinterest and aggressive worldview advocacy, an unsupportive principal, totally underqualified and surly teachers’ aides, and a plethora of other problems are a story for another day–I took extensive notes on all this while it happened and plan to write about it before too long. I would be remiss in saying that our experience in the Albany government schools was all bad. We know have a much more intimate understanding of the need for parents to take responsibility of their children’s education and not leave it to “professional” educators. Also, there WAS a wonderful school secretary in one of the schools who we appreciated very, very much.

Well before the end of our Albany government school year, we decided we would homeschool the next year. I had a great job, but worked about ten hours per day, so I only had three or four hours in the evening after dinner to work on the kids school. Lorena was (is) a stay at home mom, so she could run the kids to music lessons, homeschool groups, swim lessons, art classes, and all those sorts of things. She did not feel equipped to teach the homeschool. She speaks beautiful English, but Spanish is her first language. She kept the house, cooked for everyone, and usually attended community college three nights per week, so she had her hands full. I agreed to act as the teacher.

I had the time an energy to do the day to day teaching in the evenings and weekly lesson plans on the weekends. I love this stuff, but after my experience with Kelly’s first grade year, I knew I did not have enough time to follow The Well Trained Mind guide in the way that had worked so well for us previously. I wanted to do that, but the time required to search for materials and create lesson plans left little one-on-one time with the kids. That was the other thing. The effort to teach Christian to read in preschool took only about twenty minutes per day for about three months, so I could spend a whole lot more time on teaching Kelly. Now, I had two kids that required a couple of hours of one-on-one time plus an hour or so of planning each night and six to eight hours of preparation on the weekends if I were to do it properly, in the way that had worked so well with Kelly in the first grade. I just did not have the time.

I looked at a lot of programs that summer before Christian’s third grade year and Kelly’s fifth grade year of school. I will explain why we chose Sonlight rather than one of the others in the next installment.