Sonlight Curriculum--some questions

[mama2mychildren]

I got their catalog today and it seemed really interesting. I'm wondering though how exactly you decide what core your child should be in and is the idea to keep kids close in age in the same core or do you spread it out? It just seems like if you had more than one child you were HS, that it would require A LOT of time in the day. Maybe I'm missing something?

[lenswyf]

I have a friend who has a son who is 1st grade and a daugher who is pre-K. She did the Core K and Science K, but for language arts, she used pre-K workbooks for her daughter and Languages Arts 1 for her son. It worked out pretty well for her. Her kids both seemed to get a lot out of the core, and she is planning on going up a level for each child next year, using Core 1.

It depends on the kids, though. We did Core K with ds, and included the 4 year old that I baby-sit. While she fell in the age category, the read-alouds just seemed to go right over her head, not holding her interest, etc. Then again, she seems to be generally less mature than other kids her age, and I'm concerned about her parents plan to put her in public school next fall.

Anyway, does that help? It would take tons of time if you were doing a different core with each child. But if you have four children and only use 2 cores, it's not nearly as time consuming.

We really enjoyed our first year of Sonlight. I loved not having to plan -- especially since I'm new to the whole hs thing -- and the books were wonderful. I was particularly tickled with the Science program because we did lots of experiments and ds learned about a lot of things.