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new toCM. questions
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Hello! I’m new to the CM method. I have four boys ages 6, 4, 2, and 9 months. I recently read “For the children’s sake” and would really love to go that direction with our schooling. Right now I am teaching K with Sonlight. I enjoy using Sonlight because of the great books that we read and because I like to have somewhat of a plan to follow. In your opinion where does Sonlight fall on the spectrum of homeschooling methods? Does anyone use Sonlight (maybe with modification)? Any tips to make it fit with CM more? Where do I start? Thanks for your input!
Hi! Thanks so much for posting this question. I’m new to all of this and I am considering sonlight K as well. I’m glad to hear you’ve been enjoying it. I’d love to hear more from this group…I’ve been lurking here for a few months! 🙂
Welcome! Sonlight IS wonderful because it DOES use living books – when my oldest was just a toddler it was the curriculum I REALLY wanted to use with her, but I knew that we planned on having more children and I was concerned about being overwhelmed because of having so many children in different levels and trying to manage. I know there are others who have used Sonlight and adapted it quite well to CM, so I will leave that for them to explain, but as the mother of four girls about the same distance apart as your boys, I would encourage you to consider if you really want to have all of your children in separate or at least two different history and literature modules each year. What I LOVE about SCM is how MANY subjects can be combined for the WHOLE family! And with children close together it’s even easier to do. The ONLY subjects that my children do individually right now are math and reading – everything else we do together with a bit of modification in what is required from each in terms of mastery. (Not to mention you’ll save LOTS of money! You could buy nearly every subject for the whole year for your WHOLE family, including lots of splurges and probably be under what it costs for one child in Sonlight). Hope that’s helpful!
Rebekah
I second what Rebekah says. I used Sonlight Pre-K and K with my oldest who is 9 and while I loved many of the books, I knew it would be impossible for me to have several kids in different periods of history b/c I am learning right along with my kids.
When my oldest was in K, I discovered CM and AO and used that for half of year 1, then I discovered HIFI and liked that a bit better b/c it was American and World history instead of British & World history. However, it still had the problem of having everyone in their own cycle. Then I found SCM and knew I had found my curriculum “home.” SCM is our framework, we use all of the suggestions and just add or substitute on rare occasions. We’re finishing our first full year using all of SCM’s suggestions, though we incorporated a lot last year, and it’s going very well.
HTH,
Christie
PS – I created a master list of books in AO, HIFI and the book Honey for a Child’s Heart. After checking the Bookfinder, I refer to this list first when I’m looking for a substitute or addition. This has worked very well for us.
I have used parts of a couple of SL cores, but I am terrible about following someone else’s schedule, so don’t really have the full SL background to help you out from that standpoint….but I wanted to let you know that there is a Sonlight CM yahoo group in case you’d like to chat with SL’ers who use CM methods as you make decisions for your family.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SL-CM/
Take care,
Kim
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