Sonlight Blog Party 2015 - Sonlight Favorites

So the question this month is "What is your favorite Sonlight book or core?"

Before I say what our favorite core is, it is important to know we didn't get very far before we switched curriculum. We had completed the old preschool core, and got halfway through the K core. We did some of D+E in the 5th grade as well. We've ordered books from Sonlight through the years as well.

What my oldest dd remembers is certain books from the old K core, but also some books from 4/5. I sold 4/5 in order to purchase K, and to this day - 11 years later, she still brings up how I sold her favorite book, that Berenstain Bears science book. When it arrived again for youngest's box a few months ago, the oldest found it and hugged it. She was showing the youngest everything she remembered from that book. Next thing I knew, as I was putting books back in the box for sorting later, I noticed the BB book was missing. Youngest had placed it in her drawer!

I started the old K with oldest her "official" K year, meaning she had turned 5 the September prior but didn't qualify to start kindergarten then. There were some books she enjoyed, but it seemed as though she wasn't really understanding 100 Dresses. I wound up selling that core halfway through and getting something else. A month later, she started talking about 100 Dresses and how the protagonist felt and how mean the other girls were to her.  Apparently, she needed processing time. When she went through a bullying incident (at age 6 by another 6 year old!) that summer at my summer daycare job, she often related what was happening to her to what happened in the 100 Dresses. That book has stuck with her all these years. She's checked out both the book and audio book more than once from the library more than once through the years.

I wonder to this day how things would have turned out differently if I had stuck with Sonlight. We did thoroughly enjoy K-2 with the other curriculum, but I kept trying to figure out how to get back to Sonlight. There just wasn't a good switch time due to history sequence. By the 4th grade, we were fizzling out, and 5th we muddled through. Barely. That's when we got D+E to do near the end of the school year, worked through it all summer, but then switched to an online public charter K-12 for 6th.

It was mostly the certain books in the cores that made an impact, not one particular core. I will say, that some do not enjoy P4/5 but we did. Oldest is so ready to read those books to her younger sister! We will be starting it again in January.