I'd like opinions please on Sonlight's Eastern Hemisphere Explorer

[Hannah]

I can only see one page as a sample on the Sonlight website. Is the rest of the book in the same format as the Australia page 24?

Did you children learn from it?

 

Thanks!

[sassenach]

Hi Hannah,

 

We are using EHE this year. I need to get ready for a wedding, but I'll come back to this tomorrow.

[mims]

First, I understood that they changed it a fair bit this year so unless people are using it this year they won't be able to answer you. My 4th and 6th children did really well several years ago with the old version. It was great for research etc. They have now lowered the amount of research and added more notebooking (from what I read). I would tend to give it very high marks from both my experience and what I hear from the newer version. As usual with Sonlight, don't go with too high of a core for your child's age. My 4th grade son is advanced and he would have learned a lot more if he was older.

[LindaOz]

As an alternative to EHE, my girls read the encyclopedia reading, then type out 5 things that they learned from their reading. They save these and add to them each time they read. At the end of a country study, they print out their information (quite long by this stage) and make up project pages in a visual arts diary on that country, complete with pictures etc. They tend to prefer this to using EHE.

[Hannah]

As an alternative to EHE, my girls read the encyclopedia reading, then type out 5 things that they learned from their reading. They save these and add to them each time they read. At the end of a country study, they print out their information (quite long by this stage) and make up project pages in a visual arts diary on that country, complete with pictures etc. They tend to prefer this to using EHE.

 

That's a really neat idea. Thanks Linda.

[sassenach]

Hi Hannah,

 

EHE seems to break things up into the following catagories-

 

Mapping

Facts and figures

Important people

Religion

timeline

mini book reports

Choose your own adventure (side projects)

 

There are other pages along the way, but those seem to be in every region. To me, EHE is all about research. There are times that dd is looking up so many different facts, that I'm not sure how much we're getting in the way of retention. Because of that, I'm not making it a priority to finish every last page. I prioritize the parts that I feel are most important and let others go if we don't get around to them. Still, for research skills, it's incredible. She is getting a fair amount of geography skills out of it as well. By far, her favorite part is Choose your own adventure. She's a project girl and these are right up her alley. They give you 5 or 6 projects of differing depth to choose from. There is a point value assigned to each that gives you an idea of how involved the project is going to be.

 

EHE would be really hard to do without World Book. A lot of the info is found within the daily WB reading. I would also say that this would be challenging for a typical kid under 10 years old. Dd is 11 and she's really working hard on this.

 

hth,

[Hannah]

Thanks for the replies Shannon, Mims and Linda. I was thinking of using it next year, but now we'll wait with it.