Torchlight

[nature girl]

Have any of you used Torchlight? I was thinking of using BYL for 5th grade, but I don't think the books they cover will be engaging for my 10yo. I was looking for something similar, and the Torchlight books (I'm looking at level 3, but would use level 4 when comes out next month) are more modern, and seem like they'd interest her more. But I don't have a good feel for what the curriculum gives you. From the sample, it just seems like a list of what to read each day, without associated discussion points and activities. What am I missing?

[knitgrl]

I picked it up for ds for K, and it just didn't work for us. It ended up being a very expensive book list. I don't remember exactly all the reasons it didn't work, except that it required too much drawing for ds. Also, I do not care for Zoey and Sassafrass, and that was a big chunk of science. This past year, we did BYL Level 0 for him and his sister, and that was a much better fit for us.

[umsami]

I used Torchlight kind of a few years ago.  I bought Level 2, I think...the Middle Ages one.  As somebody else said, a very expensive book list.  The  one thing we did consistently was the history....https://www.curiositychronicles.org/

I actually used it with a 3rd grader, 6th grader, and 8th grader.  Kids would role play reading it.  Still remember my 3rd grader not knowing what a colon was, so he'd say, "Mona dot dot..." and then read her lines. 😄The older kids would then look up the person in one of the encyclopedias we had, draw a picture of them, and write a summary.  We had a timeline....and a world map....and it worked well for us. 

[nature girl]

15 hours ago, umsami said:

I used Torchlight kind of a few years ago.  I bought Level 2, I think...the Middle Ages one.  As somebody else said, a very expensive book list.  The  one thing we did consistently was the history....https://www.curiositychronicles.org/

I actually used it with a 3rd grader, 6th grader, and 8th grader.  Kids would role play reading it.  Still remember my 3rd grader not knowing what a colon was, so he'd say, "Mona dot dot..." and then read her lines. 😄The older kids would then look up the person in one of the encyclopedias we had, draw a picture of them, and write a summary.  We had a timeline....and a world map....and it worked well for us. 

 

That sounds like a fantastic way to approach the text! I looked through Curiosity Chronicles, and...I have to admit I didn't love the format. It seemed like a kind of weird choppy way to present information. Unique, for sure, and maybe it's more interesting for a child laid out in dialogue? I guess role playing it could be fun, I just don't know how well it would stick in my daughter's brain that way. But you think it worked for your kids?

Maybe the issue is that all this time I've been looking forward to doing SOtW with her (in which case I guess I should probably be looking at a different curriculum! But the rest of the books used look so good...)

[umsami]

6 hours ago, nature girl said:

 

That sounds like a fantastic way to approach the text! I looked through Curiosity Chronicles, and...I have to admit I didn't love the format. It seemed like a kind of weird choppy way to present information. Unique, for sure, and maybe it's more interesting for a child laid out in dialogue? I guess role playing it could be fun, I just don't know how well it would stick in my daughter's brain that way. But you think it worked for your kids?

Maybe the issue is that all this time I've been looking forward to doing SOtW with her (in which case I guess I should probably be looking at a different curriculum! But the rest of the books used look so good...)

It worked for us. They had audio files of the other ones, but not for this one--so this was what I came up for.  Surprisingly (to me), the kids actually liked reading it out loud.  Who knew? 😄 I liked a lot of the books, but we never did them as planned. They were more there just to read as wanted.  

Years ago, I used to use Sonlight's book lists as my shopping lists. 🙂