Sonlight is one of the granddaddies of the modern homeschooling movement.  Founded in the early ‘90’s, they are far from being the oldest homeschooling provider on the block, but they’ve quickly become well known to homeschoolers worldwide for their superb catalog full of living books, and their instructor’s guides that provide harried parents with a structured reading schedule, discussion questions and more.  The heart of Sonlight is their Core packages – combining excellent books for children and parents to read together that cover history, geography and literature.  Additional packages that cover Bible, Science, Math and Language Arts can be purchased to make a complete curriculum.

Our family was blessed to receive a Core K – Introduction to the World: Cultures with Kindergarten readers for a 5 day/week schedule, to work with in our home and evaluate.  Each Core comes with a complement of readers for your child depending upon their reading availability, and the programs feature your choice of a lighter 4 day schedule ( a few less books) or a 5 day schedule.  More books – who can resist?  My 5-year-old is now reading the tiny Fun Tales readers that were included for her level.  These were actually developed by the good folks at Sonlight.

As professing bibliophiles we were so excited to receive a big box full of beautiful books.  Some we had on our shelves already: The House at Pooh Corner, The Story About Ping, some James Herriot tales (but not the full treasury for children), The Boxcar Children and The Hundred Dresses – children’s classics both modern and with a distinguished history.  You can find the full list of included titles here; just click the green bar that says “View the 34 items included in this package”.  With the love books receive in our home, I appreciated the duplicate copies.  Sonlight’s eye for fine literature is such a blessing – they sort through so many titles to glean the most inspiring, nourishing and educational titles available to instill a love of learning in our young ones.

Can I tell you that it works?  Sonlight has a slogan – “The way you wish you’d been taught.  Guaranteed.”  Oh, I agree!  As a book lover I often sneakily read a book while my teacher rambled on, drawing on the chalkboard, assigning homework etc.  I hastened to finish in-class assignments so I could get on to the real stuff – my current book.  Oh the delight!  My children beg to do school with Sonlight.  “Mommy, please, please can we do some Sonlight?”  When we finish for the day they cry out for more.  It’s hard to keep the books together, my children continue carting them off to look through them.  Both my five-year-old and two-year-old are equally entranced by the balanced diet of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.  In a single lesson they’re introduced to heroes of the faith, fictional adventures from around the world, and train their ears to the cadence and rhythm of traditional rhymes and fun poetry.

In case the curriculum doesn’t work for your family they stand behind their guarantee, offering a no questions asked, money back refund policy.  You can buy a Core, Newcomers Package or combination of a core with supplementary modules, use it in your home for 18 weeks, reading the books with your children, the full try out period.  And if it doesn’t work, you send it back.  Wow.  They’re confident in their offerings, who else offers such a strong guarantee that your children will love learning with their program? 

Before you dive in though, you’ll want to ascertain that Sonlight’s goals, strengths and weaknesses match your family’s needs.  To help with that objective Sonlight has the brutally honest articles “27 Reasons NOT to Buy Sonlight” and “25 Reasons You Might WANT to Try Sonlight”.  Without going into all the details, I strongly recommend you read the articles to see if you and Sonlight are a good match.  To be honest, I do have a few different views, but isn’t that the case in most curriculums?  I only had to weed out one title based on our family’s convictions for literature – The Wizard of Oz.  Easy enough to skip, or thoroughly discuss any material that doesn’t jive with your family’s beliefs.

For me one of the strongest selling points for Sonlight (other than the great books) is the elimination of lesson planning on the part of the parent.  Once your instructor’s binder is set up, you grab the binder, grab your books, set yourselves down on the couch and off you go for an hour or so of reading and discussion.  For the Core K we found that a daily session would take 1 – 1.5 hours depending upon the length of the chapters assigned for reading, and how in depth we went in our discussions and narration.  The Sonlight approach is highly compatible with any learning philosophy that emphasizes literature – classical education, Charlotte Mason, Beechick, Bluedorn – I can see how it fits into them all as the read aloud/literature component.  In fact Ruth Beechick was instrumental in the reshaping of Sonlight’s Language Arts curriculum in the recent past.

Now I’ve heard a lot of family’s online commenting on the cost of Sonlight, but I’ve taken a look at it, and feel the Core’s are an excellent value.  You get a ton of books, they are non-consumable, and you can use the curriculum again and again with younger children, or just add the books to your shelves of literature, reference and history material.  Cost comparisons show they beat Amazon hands-down on price, and ordering is simple – all from a single vendor.  Currently our Core K costs $285.22 with free shipping, from Amazon (some items from Sonlight as necessary) $316.91 – free shipping from Amazon, but a small charge from Sonlight would be added due to the small size of the order.  These cost comparisons are available online at Sonlight for each Core/Reader combination.

I could go on for pages describing the fun learning experiences we’ve had with our Core K.  It boils down to this – if you and your family love reading, I highly recommend you investigate Sonlight.  In the words of my five-year-old, “It’s great, it’s terrific.” Or my two-year-old, when I asked what she thought, “Pretty good.”  Poke around their extensive website, avail yourself of the podcasts and vidcasts in the media library, and talk to their curriculum advisors (all experienced homeschoolers) on the phone or online.  If nothing else send for their free catalog, it contains the articles I mentioned above, and much more – details on their own internal scholarship program, forums, free shipping, discounts etc.  It’s really so appealing!  Have fun exploring; I think you’ll be delighted.