Sonlight C and MFW RTR

[Resse]

I’m trying to decide on a plan for the fall. I’m considering sonlight C or MFW RTR. Has anyone used either of these that can compare them?  I have a 6, 4, and 2nd grader. I already own Sonlight A and was planning on using that with my youngest, but now I’m not sure.  A lot of books in MFW look like they’d be over my second graders head. I do like the idea of everyone learning together. I also feel like Sonlight has many more readers compared to MFW, and I think my kids would enjoy their readers more than MFW. However, I already own MFW, and not Sonlight C. I would love to hear from others who have used both or just one. I do plan on using the science that comes with MFW, so I’m really just looking into the HBL from sonlight. Thoughts?  

[cbollin]

I’ll help get some conversation started. Context: all of mine are out of school age these days. So I’m looking back and remembering. Long ago I used MFW RTR. Never used SL to compare, but I can share how RTR went for me two times. First time, oldest was 4th grade. (Back then the MFW sequence didn’t have the Adventures program so we started with ECC in grade 2. this was long ago. wow. feeling my age today) Yes, some of it was dull for her since she wasn’t all that interested in Roman times. I learned to use the textbook Streams of Civilization as a tool for me to to teach from instead of read from. It isn’t really read aloud style of text for this age group in my opinion but a nice tool for me to teach from. And she would do some notebook writing from it to summarize. I was meh about Augustus Caesar World as well. I did better with it the second time I taught RTR. Not really sure anymore why that was. Been a long time. We liked RTR after we were done in Rome. That year middle gal was in MFW’s first grade program as her main stuff and anything from RTR that she did was tag along and listen, and enjoy the science and music etc. The program hasn’t really changed much since then from looking at their website of what is in the program. But for the younger siblings, they may not get as much out of some of the history and end up getting more out of the book basket list to enjoy. Oh, with MFW and books, they have a long list of “book basket” stuff in the teacher manual that you can check out as many or as few of those from library (or buy if you want). That was always a favorite part over the years to get library books like that. And if library didn’t have a suggested title, I never worried about it. Got what was available.  that's part of the program that makes it all individual and more than the package contents seem to be.

Second time I did RTR, middle gal was grade 6, and youngest was in other things due to special needs, but still liked the music and science stuff. Again, I used Streams as teaching tool. I must have gotten better with Augustus Caesar World as read aloud. I’m one of the oddballs in homeschooling who used same publisher for many years and liked what I used. But even with being a “fan” of it, I just wanted to get out of Rome sooner than the semester.

From both of those times, even when younger siblings weren’t getting much of anything from the history part of doing school together, they liked doing hands on projects, and science together, and other things. I didn’t worry about the history understanding for them even though I like the idea of history centered programs. You teach it again. Let the younger siblings have their timeline and coloring sheets and help with stuff. And if they pick up a few cool things in history for next time, that’s great. And that’s my opinion no matter if you use MFW or SL or something else.