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How do you use Sonlight secularly?


mo2
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I think there is a yahoo group for this, but I don't want to join, so can anyone here shed some light on this? How much tweaking do you have to do? Do you feel like you're leaving out so much of the program that you're wasting money? Do you have to add anything to replace the things you leave out?

 

I am leaning towards Sonlight for next year because it sounds so nice to have everything all put together for you, and I'm really stretching myself thin this year. I just can't find a secular boxed curriculum that looks appealing.

 

Thanks!

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I find secularizing Sonlight very easy and I've heard that from the Yahoo group you mentioned also. Each core is different as far as how much is involved and how many missionary stories there are involved. All I do is just substitute a different book if I find one I don't feel comfortable using or I just leave it out. There's so much reading anyway that missing a few books throughout the program is no big deal. I definitely don't feel like I'm leaving out so much that its not worth it.

 

Let me know if you have any other questions. :)

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I used Core 2 and Core 100 secularly. There are a few religious books in those cores (more in 100 than 2) which are easy to identify. The main religious content is in the "notes." DD thought the notes in 100 were rather irritating so we stopped using them. I don't find the IG user-friendly at all (having to flip between pages constantly was a hassle) so I ended up just using the schedule ... and then not using it, because I don't have such a rigid schedule that I can stick to a weekly schedule ... Sonlight is not my style afterall. It

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The main religious content is in the "notes."

:iagree:

If you look at the SL catalog, the books that come from christian publishers are marked with a cross (or something like that) so they're easy to spot and easy to skip.

 

The IG notes are loaded with Christian content. I don't use the notes, so it doesn't affect me much. Some of the cores are heavier in religious content than others - we're doing Core 5 right now and it's written in a very religious way, but it's been easy to tweak.

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For us it is easy. I skip the "Bible" portion entirely, then typically pull a couple of books each year as being too "religious". I haven't had any trouble identifying which books to pull from the catalog.

 

Our family is Christian, so I don't have a problem with some Christian content, but overall we homeschool secularly and don't appreciate curriculum teaching faith based information. I am probably a lot less sensitive than many though so YMMV.

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As far as other curricula go, I don't find SL very "Christian." I think it would be pretty easy to make it secular. I also found the guide irritating with having to flip back and forth. I think with SL, it's what you make it. If we ever used it again, it would be in parts and pieces with other things added in. I just don't find it a very strong curricula. But I totally get wanting something boxed!

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We only used Sonlight one year for 8th grade.

 

We completely skipped the Bible section.

 

I don't think we skipped any books for religous reasons. I and my sister that was using it are atheists, so at least we don't have and problems with it not being the right kind of christianity. And all of the books are interesting and worth discussing. She is also a strong reader so getting through all the books she read on her own wasn't a problem (although we did skip a couple read alouds and a couple others we couldn't get at the library or ordered on time).

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