Preparing for School… Se7en Tips for a year with Sonlight.

February 13th, 2009 · 26 Comments

So our books are on the way and we are a week or two from starting a new school year. I am starting to get back into our school gear, and the one thing many people ask is how do we do more than one Sonlight Core at a time. The simple answer is: it isn’t my school it’s my kids school – they are doing their own Cores! But I realize that you want to know more. So I thought I would write a couple of posts on how we do school. And this is the first one on preparation.

Before I get going I need to say I unashamedly use Sonlight, love Sonlight and advocate Sonlight. We do other stuff, journals and whatnot that any homeschooler can appreciate but our schedule and our books are all thanks to Sonlight.

By way of introduction I need to say that the year before we started homeschooling I started reading absolutely everything I could lay my hands on about homeschooling and visiting everyone I knew who was already homeschooling. I went to every talk, every presentation… every everything. And it really was quite easy to choose how we would go about it: Someone lent me a Sonlight catalogue and I found all those books I wanted to reread from my childhood. So in the name of providing my children with a cultural heritage by providing heaps of brilliant books I have learnt so much wonderful history that I never knew before and I have read brilliant books we have all totally loved.

Folk have said to me they wouldn’t use Sonlight because you have to read so much – I love reading to my kids and at least I know where there are!
Folk have said to me it’s not hands-on enough. It is as hands-on as you make it. The information is there in the books if you choose, for example, to make an igloo out of sugar cubes that option is yours, but not prescribed.
Folk have said to me it costs too much – compared to what? Everything comes in a box. I don’t have to spend hours sourcing it. I don’t spend my time researching for the best stuff… its in my box already. I don’t spend hours plotting and planning a schedule, that would be in my files. Anybody knows time is money and the amount of time Sonlight saves me is really priceless.

But I digress… Let’s get back to preparation!

Preparing your order:

One thing about Sonlight is that you have to read the catalogue and you have to read it thoroughly. You cannot sit down at the computer and say Right, now I am going to order school books for the next year. No, that will end in tears! You need to plot and plan which Core/Grade you are doing and which bits and bobs you will need to add in. Each year we buy the next core up and any consumable books for the previous cores that we will be using. Except this year I have forgotten to buy the grade 4 Bible books – I forgot they were consumable. So when our books arrive next week I am going to really, really kick myself! – and then rethink.

Preparing for Boxes:

Box day!!! And I have a plan. Everything is unpacked into piles science, history etc. The little stickers are popped on the back and the books labeled – before anyone may touch them and they get lost in the melee of other books floating around the house. Once that’s done I move onto the dreaded files. I hate organizing them but I love it when it’s done!

Preparing Files:

Each grade has a large file – that is sorted week by week. I organize all the files and collate pages as soon as our boxes arrive and wouldn’t dream of starting school before our files were in order! I take about a day to organize each file because at the same time I am scanning the content and mulling over ideas from other resources and letting projects spin around my head. I would hate to arrive on a Monday morning and discover we were doing a specific topic and I hadn’t gathered all my resources (apart from school books) together.

How do I sort the files: The history, read-aloud, reader and science schedules are sorted week by week and any relevant notes for readers and such-like are popped into the week that they come up for the first time in the schedule.

Each student has their own smaller file, which contains their language art sheets, their science sheets and I wish their history sheets (I know not very Charlotte Mason – but something I have often wished for anyway). Also anything else that is relevant to their school year, for example in Grade 5: Their round-the-world trip goes in there too. At the front of each of these files are the schedules for the week ahead. At the end of the week I swap out that weeks schedule with the schedule for the next week ahead.