Sonlight core 2 (or C) reviews?

[staceyobu]

Have you used this? Did you enjoy it? Pros/cons? Comparison to SOTW 2?

[ByGrace3]

bump and :bigear:

[WeeBeaks]

I have used it two years ago with my oldest.

 

As with every core we tried, we loved the books in the core. I disliked the LA, as per usual for me. I don't know why I continued to try it, because we didn't like the LA portion, though we did like the readers (we used the advanced readers, forget what they called it then). Their LA for us has always been way way too hard on the writing portion and way way too easy on the reading level. They seem to assume a student who struggles to read but does not struggle to write, which is directly opposite of a lot of kids.

 

Looking it up, we didn't use that poetry selection so I have no idea on that.

 

A con for us is the readers at that level are not tied to the historical period. It allows for ease of picking the level you need in readers, but really they are not integrated with the period at all, which I would prefer. I disliked the LA totally. A couple of the books were hard to get into, but DS enjoyed all once he got going (Strawberry Girl and Red Sails to Capri come to mind there). We hated Window on the World and scrapped that really early on. It was too preachy for us, but we are Catholic so sometimes the bible choices just don't suit us.

 

I would have used it for DS though had I been able to combine cores easier. That is my reason for leaving SL, nothing to do with the curriculum.

 

I liked to have my day scheduled out frankly. It was a lot easier to open up the schedule and go.

 

Science for SL my oldest loved and my youngest hated (though he hasn't done C). It is a wide variety of topics, so if you hate some topic the good news is you won't be doing it long. If you dislike Usborne though, you might not like Sonlight as they are heavy on the Usborne resources. I can't comment on the new dinos book as they used a different one at the time we used it, one frankly I could not bring myself to use as we are not YE. If you are, their selection on that will probably be great for you. The Curie book was very interesting. I love that they had a biography in the science.

[welovetoread]

we are new to Sonlight this year and using core C.

We are having a good time with it. I agree with alot of what the previous poster has said. I am switching up the LA, because I do NOT like the writing portion of the program. I do like the spelling and my kids seem to do well with it.

The books are good, some are liked better than others, but to us that is the fun of the program. I am using SOTW 2, along WITH this program as my kids like SOTW.

 

We are doing knights and castles right now and the kids are having a really good time.

One thing to note and you probably already know this, is that core c, is part 2 of core B. So in the Child's History of the World, you will start in the middle of the book. we still choose core c because its exactly where we left off for history last year.

 

Sorry for the horrible typing, I am nursing at the keyboard.

 

Chandi

[kiwi mum]

Agreeing with most of what has already been said, with one extra thought to add. You can't really compare it to SOTW2 as it covers the time period of SOTW 2, 3 and 4 in one year - so it is moving at three times the speed.

 

I used it along with SOTW (and a whole bunch of other stuff) and took much more than a year to get through it.

[mschickie]

We used it last year. I loved the program. We used CHOW not SOTW. Dd learned a ton from the course. I was not thrilled with the poetry selection but dd loved them and even got the rest of the books out of the library and devoured them. I personally like the LA program especially for that age. I saw a great deal of improvement in dd's writing over the year. I thought it was just enough for her age (7/8).

[TKDmom]

I have used it two years ago with my oldest.

 

As with every core we tried, we loved the books in the core. I disliked the LA, as per usual for me. I don't know why I continued to try it, because we didn't like the LA portion, though we did like the readers (we used the advanced readers, forget what they called it then). Their LA for us has always been way way too hard on the writing portion and way way too easy on the reading level. They seem to assume a student who struggles to read but does not struggle to write, which is directly opposite of a lot of kids.

 

Looking it up, we didn't use that poetry selection so I have no idea on that.

 

A con for us is the readers at that level are not tied to the historical period. It allows for ease of picking the level you need in readers, but really they are not integrated with the period at all, which I would prefer. I disliked the LA totally. A couple of the books were hard to get into, but DS enjoyed all once he got going (Strawberry Girl and Red Sails to Capri come to mind there). We hated Window on the World and scrapped that really early on. It was too preachy for us, but we are Catholic so sometimes the bible choices just don't suit us.

 

I would have used it for DS though had I been able to combine cores easier. That is my reason for leaving SL, nothing to do with the curriculum.

 

I liked to have my day scheduled out frankly. It was a lot easier to open up the schedule and go.

 

Science for SL my oldest loved and my youngest hated (though he hasn't done C). It is a wide variety of topics, so if you hate some topic the good news is you won't be doing it long. If you dislike Usborne though, you might not like Sonlight as they are heavy on the Usborne resources. I can't comment on the new dinos book as they used a different one at the time we used it, one frankly I could not bring myself to use as we are not YE. If you are, their selection on that will probably be great for you. The Curie book was very interesting. I love that they had a biography in the science.

 

I have to agree with pretty much everything here. We enjoyed almost all of the books. There were a couple of books in the Advanced readers that my dd couldn't get into, and I let her skip those. OTOH, she loved some of the other books (like Little House on Rocky Ridge and Frindle) so much that she read every book she could find by the same author.

 

We used Core 2 after reading SOTW1. It picks up exactly where SOTW1 leaves off. Then it rushes through the rest of World History to end up around WW2. I felt like we missed a lot of the details of history trying to cover everything so quickly. But what we did cover stuck in everyone's head because they liked the books so much.

 

I did a horrible job using the comprehension questions in the IG. They seemed kind of useless and dd would roll her eyes at me for asking dumb questions. I also always forgot to do the map work, too. SL has you mark each place that is mentioned in any books that you are reading, which can be rather tedious. If I had been a more experienced homeschooler, I would have only had dc map out the more important places that we read about, rather than trying to do everything and then giving up because it was too detailed. In the end the SL IG turned into a very expensive schedule for me (a schedule that I was always tweaking), and I decided to come back to SOTW.

 

Overall, I really liked Core 2. It was a fun year for us. It wasn't until the next year where I was trying to juggle 2 cores and had one ds who didn't fit into either core very well that I realized SL wouldn't work well for our family.

 

If you intend to continue using SL in future years, some of the books become really intense--SL intentionally chooses books that dc will have a strong emotional response to. I was hitting Core 4 with a sensitive 4th grader, and I realized that I just couldn't read things like Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry to her. If I had it to do again, I think I would have made sure she was at the top of the age range for each core, and combined her with her younger brother who is less sensitive. She was advanced academically, but she wasn't emotionally prepared to read books about difficult subjects.

Edited November 21, 2011 by bonniebeth4