If you left Sonlight for HOD....

[hsmom23]

Why??? What did you like better about HOD?? That's all:tongue_smilie:, TIA

[birchbark]

Better teacher's guide, more subjects covered, stronger skill building. Here are some other threads comparing the two.

[jer2911mom]

We left HOD for SL this year and have returned to HOD. We loved the SL books, but really missed the hands-on activities in HOD. We didn't do any art projects with SL, but do them weekly in HOD, and they are very easy to do. My younger dd can join in on the activities as well, whereas with SL she didn't do any part of it. We did not care for the SL LA at all. It felt random and disjointed. HOD seems to be much better at skill building. We liked the SL science, but had a hard time getting the science experiments done, and did not like the worksheets. The HOD science seems simple, but actually does a really good job of teaching the concepts in a memorable way and actually gets done.

 

We wanted to try SL because it has more books in the early levels, but for my younger dd I will just add in SL books to HOD. It's much harder for me to add the hands-on and art to SL. HOD actually uses a lot of the same books as SL and has more books in the higher levels, so we probably won't need to add very many as we go along.

 

I think for us it boiled down to the fact that there was nothing to do with what you read in SL other than the science experiments, which weren't getting done (we couldn't find a bulb in November, for example). Once you read the books, there was nothing else done to work with the material and make it stick. (We found the SL activities tips to mostly just be links to other websites and I need everything very open-and-go.) HOD approaches the information from several different angles (movement, art, writing, drawing, etc.), and that seems to make the information stick better for my dd. We like that variety.

 

Right now we are doing Beyond but are still finishing out Core A as we can.

 

HTH,

Kathy