SL Core 100 users? Looking for opinions

[motherdear]

I'm seriously looking at this for my 14 y/o, but I'm hearing quite a lot of negative about the J. Hakim spine. How have others substituted? Are the core's notes overwhelming? Recommendations?

[LindaOz]

I have just bought this for my 14yo and we haven't started it yet so I won't be much help. I just thought I'd say that I have also bought the Hakim books and they look very intresting. Apparently, the SL notes point out and discuss areas of possible dispute so that the student is aware of the issues.

[ondreeuh]

Logic or High School would be better forums for this question, but my older DD did try Core 100 last year (8th grade). I say try, because she could not keep up. Each day had 2-3 chapters of Hakim scheduled, plus readings from a historical fiction book and a literature book. She is a slow/easily distractable worker and the workload was way too heavy for her. Content-wise, it was fine for 8th grade.

 

The paperwork with the Core (student notes, teacher notes) is extremely cumbersome. Everything is divided by book, so when you are reading 3 books a day you have to find the questions in three different places (in addition to the schedule pages at the front), and keep track of where you are with Post-It flags since each day's work all runs together. Ideally she would have opened up the notes for a particular book, read the notes for the day's work before reading, then answered the questions, and then moved on to the next book, but she wasn't that organized and preferred to read in bed. To go over the questions, I would have had to keep track of my place in 3 different sections of the binder and it's just an awful lot of flip-flopping. We ditched the IG very quickly. :(

 

I kept the Core, and I plan on using parts of it for my son when he is in middle school. I think I may just pull the questions from each section and re-write them into daily worksheets. It sounds like a LOT of work and I am NOT excited about doing that.

 

Oh, we loved Hakim. For those that object, the SL notes do a very thorough dissection of everything JH writes.

[Julie]

What about Notgrass American History? I have not used it yet, but am planning to when the kids finish up a state history class. I have only breezed over the materials, and I really like what I see thus far. My son just started their Goventment, so far so good. :)

 

You also might consider MFW Books. I am using thier Adventures with my 2nd grader and loving it. I used Sonlight for years, and am liking MFW so much more that I will probably continue it with my youngest.