Questions about Sonlight for highschool

[momof2boys]

Okay my son is going into the 11th grade this fall and I am trying to get my plans finalized before my upcoming surgery in about a week. I am looking at using Sonlight but have some questions. Question number 1..has anyone used there 20th century world history and if so how did you like it? Question number 2...how is the language arts? Question number 3...I have looked at using Alternate World History but wondered what I could add to it to make it more highschool usable...any ideas?

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this and help me out!

Gloria

[Bee]

I have the 20th century world history core but dd won't be starting it until July. She has looked through the 2 books they use for history spines and likes both of them and has been looking up tons of information in them. I have to keep reminding her to save them for school. I am not having her use the LA portion. It requires the student to write about what they have been reading and to think at a depth that I don't think my 9th grader is ready for yet. She needs more hand-holding through writing than the LA assignments provide. In addition, I wanted some sort of LA program that provided me with an answer key to assist in monitoring her work and something to make her accountable for doing work at the required grade level(thus using a LA program designed specifically for her grade level). We are using this core for history and literature at dd's request.

[AngieW in Texas]

My 11th grader finished Core 300 last week. I didn't care for it.

 

The history was extremely choppy. It needed something more to provide a more cohesive look at the 20th century. I ended up adding in Short History of the Twentieth Century. Somebody posted it on the upper level Core forum on the SL boards. That helped a lot to make the history hang together better.

 

There were quite a few elementary and middle school level books thrown in. We dropped all of those.

 

There was a lot of heavy literature too. I was disappointed in the notes available for the books. I bought the Core IG so I would have a schedule, but I also bought it for the literary analysis aspect. If you really want to study the books, you'll need to do sparknotes as well.

 

The writing assignments offered no instruction about how to actually do the writing.

 

I used Windows to the World (IEW) for literary analysis and writing instruction.

 

I have used SL with my kids since K, but I won't use it for high school again. I'm done trying to make their high school level Cores work for us.