Why has Sonlight fallen in popularity?

[Laurel-in-CA]

In The beginning I was always so tempted by Sonlight but never gave it a try because:

 

Expense and shipping ...imagine the cost shipping all that to Australia..I've noticed they have recently introduced an online version...but too late. We went with Moving Beyond The Page because they started up their online version years ago.

 

Confusion...the website is overwhelming and its hard to know what you need

 

Age range...I attempted a few times just to use it as a booklist but the books were too hard for my kids. At 9,8 and 6 they are now starting to enjoy books from the first few levels...and my kids are great readers but the books didnt peak their interest till then.

 

Difficult to use with all the page flipping and such.

 

We use MBTP as well as BYL. We love the books for BYL and the activities for MBTP are great. Plus bonus...they are secular. We are religious but I prefer to keep religion out of schoolwork.

 

Plus the biggest turnoff seems to be their customer service. I will always stick with MBTP because of their outstanding customer service. Sonlight doesn't seem to understand how loyalty works and offend their customers regularly.

 

I call it "shoot yourself in the foot marketing."

[TranquilMind]

I know because I'm still on the SL forums, though not as active there as I am here (and I'm not all that active here). The catalog has been mailed, I believe; some may have already received theirs. I'm not sure if the online catalog is available yet or not. The new products will be available for order on 1 April.

 

 

More general comments, not specifically in response to Slache:

 

We used Sonlight for preschool (P3/4) and preK (P4/5). Even at those young ages, I tweaked. And I did not at all like the K LA that we added to P4/5. And I used it at the younger ages rather than the older, so I felt that the books were a little too advanced for my child, but--especially after reading TWTM--I didn't want to delay Core A (intro to world cultures) until 1st and not start history until 2nd, and I didn't want to do their cycle--world cultures, 1-2 years of world history, 1-2 years of American history, repeat. I didn't get the impression that their materials would help me discuss the books with my daughter as she got older, and I need help with that.

 

And as conservative a Christian as I am, I still find a good bit of their marketing statements and some of their books (some missionary ones) to be too fundamentalist for me. I was uncertain about supporting them financially for those reasons. And then there was a big kerfluffle when they attached specific grades to the cores. I had started considering slowing down our progression through the cores, but I realized that if I did that, then I'd end up teaching my daughter with products that were labeled a grade or two below where I considered her to be, and if she picked up on that, or if my husband's employer--who pays for our homeschool expenses--picked up on that, it would be trouble. And then I realized that these kerfluffles tend to happen regularly with Sonlight, and I decided that I couldn't trust them enough to plan for more than a year or two in advance, and I'm a serious long term planner--I'm fine with changing the plan from year to year, but I want to be able to tweak a plan, not be forced to create a new one because my product supplier radically changed something.

 

So I switched to Tapestry of Grace, and I really like it (so far, at least, one year in). I do look at the Sonlight website and book lists, and I've pulled several of their books to add to our studies, or to have available for fun literature. I'll get the catalog this year--I really want to see these book descriptions I've been hearing about for years. Removing LA from the core makes me more likely to go back to SL at some point, but even then, it isn't that likely, because my overall concerns about the company haven't changed and because I like TOG, and it's easy enough to pick up additional books from the SL list if I want to.

 

I think bittersweet is a good word to describe how I feel about Sonlight. They were my entry into homeschooling. Having their "perfectly laid out" plans, and still feeling the need to tweak them, taught me a lot about how I use curriculum--specifically, that although I like something that has a plan, it needs to be not so planned that it messes everything up when I tweak it! They gave me the confidence to branch out into something that fits me better, but that I would have found overwhelming had I started with it. But I still also have a little bit of the ick factor at some aspects of the company--even though I know Christians who are less conservative than I am who love Sonlight, and I still want to love them. I just ... don't.

Agree.  Great entry point to home schooling.  We loved most of the books and I read a lot to the kids.  So glad we did that.

 

The forums took a dive when multiple people left, and the discussions became less interesting.