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why use this over sonlight
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I was packing up what I have from sonlight from last year and was wondering what the differences are between the 2. And cost is not a factor in our decision making.
The biggest difference I think is that Sonlight stuffs a child full of books trying to get every ‘good’ book in, whereas Simply Charlotte Mason lets a child slowly savor each book, but to do so much choose the ‘best’ book to represent a time period or person. When you read books on a slower schedule (a la SCM) the child has lots of time to think about:
- what has already happened in the story
- what might happen next
- what they would do if they were the character in the story
- they have time to really imagine the setting and living through the events.
This is what I’ve found in my house at least. Before reading books on a SCM schedule (which rarely has us reading more than a chapter in a particular book each day) we would dive into a chapter book and keep reading “one more chapter”, often finishing a long book in a week or week and a half. They remembered the big, sweeping overview, but the in-depth living with the characters and the times wasn’t there. We gorged on books instead of savoring them.
Now we take weeks, even over a month in some cases, to read a book. We narrate our way through, the children have time to really think about the story. Yes, my children still sometimes beg for “just one more chapter”, and occasionally I will read a second chapter – if we have lots of time that day. I never read beyond that in a day for our SCM books. I have seen my children’s play life become rich with the stories they are savoring. Right now we are finishing up the time of the Vikings and it has been amazing to see the details they have incorporated into their play, their drawings, and so on – all because we’ve spent the time to live with the books.
This ‘slow reading’ is one part of CM that I have yet to implement. (I just started reading her this summer.) I always feel a bit of a tantruming two year old inside me when I think of ‘slow reading’. I don’t WANT to read slowly! 🙂 I also remember so clearly how I read to my then 3yo for hours a day from the Little House series and he LIVED Laura for years. It was really formative in the development of his personality I believe. I can’t imagine just reading one book in the series per year.
Maybe because my homeschoolers are only 5yo, I haven’t found a specific schedule to follow with reading CM recommended books. I’ve found lists of suggestions but I don’t find them to be better than the list Sonlight puts out. In fact to create our reading list this year I have pulled all the books from Sonlight, some CM lists, Beautiful Feet’s Character through Literature and TJEd book lists. I love the books Sonlight recommends.
I like lots of the Sonlight books, too. I do want to say something about reading slowly—this is definitely an area for an “adult experiment.” If you don’t believe the principle, give it a try. I set myself to read two similar-difficulty book lists, one my normal “speed” way and one taking a year to do it. I was completly astonished by the difference in what I remembered from the books, even now, several years later. Why go to the trouble of reading and get less out of the books, when there is an easy way to remember more? True, some books like Little House can be gulped whole, and because there are so many you can still be immersed long enough for everything to “stick”. This will not work so well, however, for Pilgrim’s Progress, or Shakespeare, or Kim, or Kidnapped, or Treasure Island. I have seen the difference in myself and in my own children. Give it a try! Go ahead and pull in books from wherever. I do, too. But if you take advantage of the basic principles taught by CM, you will find differences–and sometimes very marked differences–in what your children take in, how they process it, and what sticks with them years later.
I too love the Sonlight book lists and do draw on them as a resource, but there are a couple of reasons why I opted not do go the Sonlight route. 1) I personally don’t like using someone else’s lesson plans. But that’s just me – so more of a personal preference than anything else. 2) I think that there is more flexibility to tweak things to suit your children or your family – both schedule wise and subsitutuing resources that may be a better fit for you. 3)As others have mentioned I like that SCM uses fewer, but richer, book resources. While we’ve found some gems on the Sonlight lists, they also use a lot of Usborne-type books that are flashy and colorful, but not exactly fabulous literature that will really ‘stick’ in the long run.
Jen
Another big difference is that SCM combines children for many subjects – including history, so you’re all doing the same time period – not a big deal if you have one child, but a significant difference for moms with many kids and even helpful for a mom with two – and helpful for the kids too, because then they are learning about the same thing and have someone to discuss with (or my girls will pretend about different things they’re learning about together – it’s much more fun to play African explorers with someone who knows the dangers of the African Jungle LOL).
Rebekah
I am a former SL and Ambleside Online user. I used SL for the first 3 years (PreK to 1st gradish) and AO for the next few years after that. Now we’re using SCM as a base and adding in books from both SL and AO as we see fit.
Here’s why SCM won out as our base:
1) I always felt like Bible was an extra to ‘get through’ with the other two curriculums, with SCM it feels like it’s important and not to be hurried through so we can get to other books. For us, the Bible IS the most important book, so it should be at the center of things.
2) With SCM I am able to easily add any SL or AO books that I choose. The best of the best, if you will. I admit to NOT always reading books slowly. We did do this with AO, though, and did enjoy it, but we’re ready for a little change, and while we’re not reading as fast as SL, we’re not reading as slowly as we did with AO, because we are adding in a few books on Ancient Egypt that I scheduled in, so it pushes things together a little more. But I still find the pace to my liking. In other words, I can easily make SCM into exactly what I want it to be for that given year by using their fabulous guide as a just that…a GUIDE! When we do Ancient Greece with SCM I can add in Plutarch for Children from AO, and other great old living books about Greece. And I get to choose what is best for each of my children without having a guide that I simply can’t get into. SL’s guides always felt stifling to me.
3) With SL I could put my older kids together, my younger kids together, and my youngest would eventually be by herself. With AO they were all on different levels. With SCM I can teach on the same topic and have special books for older and younger and STILL save time! Oh, precious time! Yes, I think we could all use a little extra time as busy homeschool moms.
4) The Bible studies worked into the history. We are doing a Hebrews family study from SCM right now on the side over summer, and we get to do a FABULOUS Bible study with our Ancient history, called Jashub’s Journal. Forgive me if I spelled his name wrong, I don’t have it here with me. Anyway, it’s interactive and my kids are going to love it and we ALL will learn a lot.
So this year we’re doing SCM mod 1 (Ancient history). We are enjoying going through the Bible in Genesis and imagining what Abraham and other key Bible figures may have seen in Egypt. So we study Egypt on the side, using SCM’s books, but also adding in a SL book with pictures for my littles, and a couple of older books on Egypt for my bigs. Plus we added History Pockets, which we haven’t done a whole lot with yet, but it’s cool because we’ll be studying Egypt all year and we have TIME to get to them! If we just enjoying doing one pocket every couple weeks or so we’ll still get done.
An added note: We did try Sonlight again briefly last year before we found SCM. I was looking for something new to get the kids together again after having used AO for three years. We tried SL Core 3 because it would have been perfect reading level for my 9 year old. But of course it was VERY EASY for my 11 year old. After having read AO books reading JUST SL style books was extremely easy. With that fact, and that the schedule again seemed stifling, we found SCM shortly after and I couldn’t be more thrilled.
Happy Homeschooling everyone!
Bookworm, I guess I am sort of doing your experiment now with Little Women. I started reading it from the library but then would feel anxious since I knew I had to return it and wanted to read each word slowly bc I LOVE every word in that book. So I bought my own copy and now am only reading a few pages each night (all the time I have right now) but I’m enjoying immensely each evening’s installment. And I guess I also read slowly to my older children who spend all day in school. I do a read aloud book for each of them (ages 11 and 14), one chapter a night. Its my children who are home all day that I haven’t read slowly to. But I’m pondering it…especially after reading many great recommendations for it on this forum.
And I had forgotten the Usborne type books Sonlight uses. I just use the literature list, and then not all of it.
Sorry Titus2mama for talking so much about slow reading vs Sonlight-v-SCM.
Thanks everyone,
shannon
We’ve used SL, AO and now SCM/AO. What I prefer about a mix of SCM/AO to SL is that the SL guides kept me bogged down and a bit stressed. Trying to keep up with the guides kept me from being able to implement many CM ideas in our school. I love SCM’s “Planning your CM Education” book. It allows me to customize a CM education to fit our families individual needs. HTH some:) Gina
Remember, too, that a CM education is not about a curriculum. It truly is a philosophy. While I enjoy many of the titles from Sonlight, their curriculum uses living books, but it is not and does not purport itself to be a CM education. A CM education is about so much more that a certain stack of books.
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