Box day!

After spending a lot of time researching the internet and chatting with friends (many of whom have taught their children for years and have tried everything!) we decided to purchase a Sonlight curriculum. www.sonlight.com

As home educators, there is no set curriculum we have to follow. What I really like about Sonlight is that they choose really nice books. They are child friendly clear factual books (“Twaddle free” as Charlotte Mason would describe them!). It’s a literature based curriculum. Michael loves reading, and as a family we read a lot together, so this style of teaching really fits us well. Being new to home education, I in particular felt I wanted a curriculum that covered most subjects and gave me everything I would need on a plate. Sonlight have provided a weekly timetable as a guide, but we intend to pick and choose a bit to find what suits us, so for the time being we’re not following this. We expect this “1 year curriculum” will probably last at least 2. As Michael is only 5, we believe he shouldn't be doing the kind of formal education that schools here in the UK are teaching. There is too much pressure put on our little children. Children are naturally inquisitive and we should be nurturing this, not forcing standardised “factory like” education on them (in our opinion!). I think the majority of his learning should be through play and led by his own inquisitive mind. I/we provide the environment (both at home, and through many many outings and groups we attend) and resources to nurture this and his natural desire to be a sponge for knowledge does the rest.

We have been following the readers (books he reads to me) and the read alouds (books I read to him/them) that Sonlight provided (this is obviously alongside plenty of books we choose too!) and read together several times a day. We were able to pick and choose our curriculum to suit Michael’s abilities. Michael is a very competent reader so we have grade 2 readers (grade 2 is the equivalent to year 3 in UK) but he struggles with writing so we bought their “Handwriting without tears 1”. The handwriting programme was developed by occupational therapists and is a “developmentally based handwriting programme”. I will do a separate blog post about this as I've been SO pleased by the results we've had so far! We also chose to follow Singapore maths (it seemed the best in my opinion and seems to follow on well from what he's already done at school) and try to do a little maths and writing every day. We play a lot of maths games together, but again will save this for another blog post.

It was very exciting the day our curriculum arrived (Sonlight call this “box day”)! Michael had lots of fun unpacking it all! Even the boxes themselves were exciting because they were printed on the insides to become a castle and a space shuttle!

We’re really enjoying this new phase of home ed life and look forward to continuing to learn more and more together.