umsami Posted November 14, 2014 Share Posted November 14, 2014 Just wondering about those of you who tried Bookshark this year. Are you and your kids enjoying it? If you secularized an old Sonlight core before....how does this compare? Thanks :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paceofnature Posted November 15, 2014 Share Posted November 15, 2014 :lurk5: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BatmansWife Posted November 16, 2014 Share Posted November 16, 2014 Just wondering about those of you who tried Bookshark this year. Are you and your kids enjoying it? If you secularized an old Sonlight core before....how does this compare? Thanks :) We are using BookShark 4 and love it. :001_wub: Just last night my dd again said how this has been her best and favorite year of homeschooling in her life (she's mentioned this several times this school year). It's definitely a success here and we are planning on using it until there is no BookShark left to use. We have the full grade package (if you are interested i have a blog post showing what we got in level 4). I've ended up tweaking it a little as far as the writing assignments. I'm selecting only the writing portions that I want JB to do (which might possibly be none), because I realized with her first BkSk writing assignment that she definitely needed to back up and basically start at the beginning for writing. So we are using WriteShop (I won level D...yay!). I also add in Fix It Grammar, and spelling (AAS and Delightful Dictation with Spelling). Oh, and of course math (Teaching Textbooks). I just told JB that you were asking about BookShark and I asked her what she thinks of it. She said, "It's the best homeschool program in the entire United States of America!!" So, there you have it! Oh, and I have never used Sonlight, so I don't know how easy it would be to secularize that or not. I may attempt to do just that for highschool, if BkSk decides to not make highschool levels. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Papillon Mom Posted December 4, 2014 Share Posted December 4, 2014 My difficult to please daughter is doing really well with bookshark 3. We do it verbatim and I'm extremely happy with the scope. It is working wonderfully for us and we couldn't be more pleased. The la is fabulous! My dd did a research report over 3 weeks of step by step instruction that blew her ES's socks off. The science was lacking evolution but we cover that subject a lot for fun. It was fun and it got done and she learned a ton! I don't care for their personal beliefs - buuut, I don't see a heavy enough influence in bookshark to interfere with dd's schooling- when I see bias, which happens in history, from time to time- we talk about it and dd ends up going on a rant about it to some unsuspecting innocent bystander later on... Pretty funny. it's a great, secular, comprehensive program and it's open and go! Yay! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
umsami Posted December 4, 2014 Author Share Posted December 4, 2014 Made me wonder about Kinza Academy (Hamza Yusuf) and they are putting their curriculum on a new website for free in 2015. http://kinzaacademy.com/curriculum.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mommymilkies Posted December 4, 2014 Share Posted December 4, 2014 If you are considering SL secular Or funding their owner and book sharks I would encourage you to google up their targeted campaign to convert muslims. I got those emails. Sickening. They really bugged me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
umsami Posted December 4, 2014 Author Share Posted December 4, 2014 I got those emails. Sickening. They really bugged me. I actually wrote them back a few times (like 5-6 years ago) and disputed some things that they wrote. I think I even got a reply that was relatively nice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mommymilkies Posted December 4, 2014 Share Posted December 4, 2014 It looks like I deleted the emails, but I just got another, here's a snippet: " Pray for a plentiful harvest Though the donation match has ended, you can support the ongoing mission to tell Muslims that Jesus loves them. Please continue to pray for those whom God will send with His message of love and forgiveness, as well as for those who will hear and receive the Good News. Thanks again for your participation. May God richly bless your family. Gratefully,Tim Heil" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nukeswife Posted December 4, 2014 Share Posted December 4, 2014 We were trying Bookshark 5 this year and it was a bust. We're reading the books randomly and ditched the program otherwise. The Worldbook and EHE pages were so stinking boring. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
umsami Posted December 4, 2014 Author Share Posted December 4, 2014 It looks like I deleted the emails, but I just got another, here's a snippet: "Pray for a plentiful harvest Though the donation match has ended, you can support the ongoing mission to tell Muslims that Jesus loves them. Please continue to pray for those whom God will send with His message of love and forgiveness, as well as for those who will hear and receive the Good News. Thanks again for your participation. May God richly bless your family. Gratefully, Tim Heil" Heil Tim! Guess what, we Muslims already love Jesus, but thanks. Have a nice day, Love, Umsami Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AHASRADA Posted December 6, 2014 Share Posted December 6, 2014 I used the SL book lists from their catalog with ds for cores 3, 4 and 5. We especially enjoyed some of the core 5 "3rd culture kid" selections. I never bought a core because I didn't want to have to work around the bible stuff. I was so psyched about Bookshark and was tentatively planning to use it for at least K-2,...then the emails started coming :( Not a smart marketing strategy to tell a Muslim homescbooler that you're going to use proceeds from her purchases to try to convert her brothers in faith. Sooo, I'm likely back to following the book list and picking up MBtP in grade 2-3 as planned. I have also really enjoyed my selections from Timberdoodle, and I now see that they offer secular options (assuming they aren't funding similar activities). Both programs offer more hands-on activities than SL/BkSk anyway :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
umsami Posted December 6, 2014 Author Share Posted December 6, 2014 Sarita is so happy you respect Jesus http://www.sonlight.com/blog/2014/10/why-muslims-why-frontiers-why-off-road-encounters.html Luke loves to eat falafel http://www.sonlight.com/blog/2014/09/150-muslims.html It just seems so weird to me to read these things about donating $26/month to help convert people to a different faith. And can they be anymore stereotypical with the pics of camels and chatting about falafel? I appreciate the reminder, though, that 50% of their company's profits go to this. I didn't know it was that large. Have a cousin who has spent the past 15 or so years as a missionary for the Navigators in Indonesia with her husband. They've built a school there, and that's their official reason....but they're employed by the Navigators, and they send out Christmas magnets to all of us asking us to pray for them and support them in their mission. Even my parents, who aren't necessarily warm and fuzzy towards Islam, find it weird. Kind of like Jews for Jesus. I don't really care if people voluntarily switch faiths, although knowing what that can mean to somebody in a Muslim family....especially in an isolated area of a conservative country (which is where I'm assuming these 1100+ groups are)... I'm not so sure I'd be comfortable encouraging that. (I don't agree with those practices, but I can't ignore that they exist.) Also, what if the conversion doesn't stick, for lack of a better word. Known quite a few people who've done altar calls, been heavily into Christianity (or another faith) for a few years..and then, things change. So that hypothetical Muslim convert would go through the hell of a family shunning or something else all for nothing? I didn't know Timberdoodle was a Christian company either. I've never seen anything on their site about missions and stuff. Must go research more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MerryAtHope Posted December 6, 2014 Share Posted December 6, 2014 We were trying Bookshark 5 this year and it was a bust. We're reading the books randomly and ditched the program otherwise. The Worldbook and EHE pages were so stinking boring. Sonlight F has the same issue with Worldbook/EHE (we also abandoned ship with SL F and just read the books that year--a lot of interesting books but my least favorite year of homeschooling because of the level's structure). People generally love or hate that level--very different from other SL levels, and I'd guess the same is true in Bookshark. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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