We recently made the decision to switch to Sonlight for our homeschooling. This will be my first blog in a series on the curriculum, starting with explaining why we decided to make the switch as well as some money saving tips, and covering first thoughts when we receive the curriculum, thoughts after the first couple of weeks of using it, and then periodically throughout the year touching on things that we love, and, if applicable, things that we do not love. At the end of the year I will give a final overview on what Rich and I thought, what the kids thought, and how well our children learned with it.
*Disclaimer* I am not being compensated for this in any manor. These are my own thoughts, and where applicable Rich and the kid's thoughts.
Before now, we have been using a mix of various curriculum, and I was beginning to feel rather overwhelmed realizing that I would now be trying to balance that for three separate levels. It has honestly been enough of a challenge to balance time for everything for just two kids.
I have always thought full curriculum was not for us. I liked to be able to customize things more, and hated how expensive it was, and how hard it was to find every single piece you needed used, because you need tons of pieces that are only available new from them. I also really prefer learning through literature verses doing lots of worksheets.
The first thing that attracted me to Sonlight was the amount of reading. A lot of the curriculum is reading together. Yes, there are still work sheets that the kids are supposed to do, but they are limited and mostly focused on teaching children to love to write. I think this is great, as I love writing. Even with that aspect, though, I was really turned off by the price, and the amount of time it would take me to teach three levels with this. Then my friend told me about something awesome that they offer. They actually make it easy to group kids that are close enough in age together so that they are doing a lot of the core work together, drastically reducing the teaching time required. It also cuts down on the price a good deal. Lastly, I did find out that they offer time payments. They will break your total into four payments, the first is due immediately, then they have different lengths of time available for the other three payments. It is interest free. This helped us as our payments are almost exactly what we set aside for school needs every two months, so that is the option we went with. If we stick with this curriculum next year, I will budget ahead of time and be prepared to pay up front since I truly hate owing money, but it was definitely a nice option that helped us make the decision to go ahead and dive in for this year.
I will also mention that for the girl's Pre-Kindergarten things, I tracked most of them down used. I also did this with Tobiah's readers, although I could not find two books in particular (or at least not for less expensive than Sonlight offered them) so I ended up ordering those. It did help that we had several of Tobiah's readers already (which is GREAT! I certainly love that Sonlight uses regular books verses books only offered through them for the majority of their teaching), and one of the girl's books. I managed to save about $200 by ordering the books this way. I likely could have managed to save more, but it was already pretty overwhelming to track the long list of books I had down, and the thought of doing that for more was a bit too much for me to handle in a short amount of time. I feel like I picked a good middle ground between making things a bit easier on myself and saving money. Again, assuming we continue to be happy with the choice we made to switch to Sonlight, I will likely work on tracking down the list for next year all year long, eliminating the need to make a choice between saving money and not completely overwhelming myself. The one thing I want to ensure that I do, though, is to buy at least ONE core from them each year, as this gets you a 10% off all purchases made for an entire year, as well as free shipping on all orders. This has already come in handy with a book that I thought I had found, only to have the seller refund my money. I could not find it inexpensively anywhere else and managed to get it for very cheap from Sonlight-the one I originally bought that was refunded was only 50 cents cheaper than ordering from Sonlight.
The things that I did make a point of just buying new were all the teachers guides, which come with the student worksheets and really everything you need but books themselves for the older kids. For the younger girls I had to buy four work books each, but they were not terribly priced. You can find the teachers guides used on various websites where people sell their used curriculum, and I also found them at Homeschool Potpourri here in Washington (but remember, even if you are from out of state you can call Homeschool Potpourri and make a phone purchase!), but for this year at least I decided to just buy them new. If I can find them in good enough shape for next year, I may do things differently. We will just have to wait and see.
So, there you have it. A big and exciting update about our homeschool journey, the reasons why I decided to make the switch, and a few pointers to save some money. Check back soon for my next post in this series about our first impression when receiving the curriculum.
