The kind of book that generates the most passionate personal response is usually one that made us cry. Mention one of the ten books listed below in a group of Sonlighters, and you will hear these kinds of phrases from those who've read them:
Continue reading
Having a large family can be chaotic. And messy.
One child might be cutting paper, a second playing with LEGO bricks, and a third sewing, while other children are in their rooms playing with toys. Dishes pile up, laundry hides under beds, and shelves overflow.
I find it hard to concentrate when the house is messy. I can tolerate a fair amount of chaos, but it reaches a limit where I start feeling stressed and frustrated. If I am feeling that, it stands to reason the clutter also affects my children, even if they are better at ignoring messes.
Messes also lower my motivation. Cluttered tables and counters reduces any incentive for performing science experiments and completing writing assignments. Laundry covering the sofa makes it harder to enjoy Read-Alouds. Being sick and knowing there’s a mess waiting makes it harder to feel better.
Homeschooling in a mess is harder than homeschooling in a clean area. When our rooms are cleaner, we find our days go more smoothly. Having a clean homeschool area helps our family:
Keeping our working areas clean motivates us to work longer and harder than a messy space does.
Certain messy areas affect some people more than others. I don’t mind if my children are playing on the floor, or have a cluttered corner, but anything at eye level bothers me. Messy shelves and dirty counters pull down my mood and increase my stress level. My husband, however, doesn’t mind cluttered counters, but hates messy floors. He can’t rest if the floor doesn’t feel clean enough to him, so he often sweeps and mops when he gets home before he can relax and enjoy being with his children.
By identifying areas which cause stress for each person, it’s easier to focus cleaning for the greatest impact. For example, when I’m about to start homeschooling , we clean counters and tables so I have a clean line of vision. When dad is on his way home, we pick up the floors.
Certain areas of the house also collect clutter. For example, we get used to putting all our mail in one spot, or placing laundry in baskets that need to be dealt with later.
Identifying those problem areas helps with strategies to make cleaning easier and faster. If I place a basket in the area that collects clutter, I can pick up the basket and carry it around with me while I hunt for homes for each object. If I place a recycle bin under the mail table, I can quickly sort the mail as soon as I get home.
For our large family, one key to keeping a clean house is constantly purging:
Decluttering our house seems never-ending. But we are actually happier with fewer possessions. It’s easier to clean, easier to find toys they want to play with, and makes finding what we need simpler. It also gives us more places to put the things we want to keep.
With some objects, the memories they hold are more important than the actual item. In this case, take photographs of favorite homework assignments or rock collections and sort the pictures into online folders.
For purging, we use
I like to set aside 20 minutes for decluttering one spot of my home. I take everything out of the area, clean it, and put away only what belongs. Everything else gets sorted with my above list of containers.
One of the hardest things about keeping a house clean is dealing with things that don’t belong anywhere. By creating established storage places for items, it's easier to put them away.
Having a set place for everything helps make cleaning less stressful for your children, too. They won’t feel a need to hide things that they can’t find homes for or ask you where each item goes.
One big cleaning job is usually necessary at least twice a day, but we can make those lighter by cleaning in between those times. Here are tips for ongoing cleaning:
Localized Cleaning: Choose one area that needs to be cleaned the most, and focus on that alone.
Basket/Box Cleaning: When cleaning an area quickly, place items that don’t belong in that area in a box or basket to be put away later. It’s easier to carry around a basket of supplies than put away each item one by one.
Cleaning Music: Finish cleaning before a set number of songs pass, or dance to music while you clean. You can play various types of educational music during this time.
Challenges: Race a timer or each other. Add challenges such as “I think I can clean all the toy cars before you can clean all the blocks.” Only items correctly put away count. This is a great activity for children still learning to count and sort to work on those skills.
My oldest four children are in charge of washing and drying two loads of laundry each per week. I don't assign specific clothes, so they can do any two loads. I do anything left over, which is usually minimal.
When a load is complete, we bring it to a central place. Then, my oldest children put clothes on hangers (we hang everything possible, with long racks to hang the clothes, so little goes in drawers), and I fold any items requiring folding. The four youngest try to beat us by rushing to put each pile and set of hangers away as fast as possible. We can put away a full load of laundry in minutes, and it doesn’t sit in baskets. Since they only have to put away a dozen or two items each time, it makes it more fun and easier than sorting through piles of clothes.
Hopefully, some of these tips and techniques for cleaning our house can be adapted to help you keep your house a bit cleaner and better organized. With a large family, your house may never be completely clutter-free, but it can be less stressful and make your school and rest times feel better, too.
Sonlight helps you organize your homeschool day with detailed Instructor's Guides.
What's more important to you in your homeschool? Finishing the curriculum or mastering the concepts? Checking the boxes or seeing your kids make mental connections?
When I considered my goals for my homeschool, it decided I wanted to prioritize mastery and high-quality work even when that meant moving more slowly through the curriculum.
Clever homeschooled students may discover a certain truth: “The faster I complete all of my school tasks...the sooner I have free time!” Once they make this realization, they begin to speed through books and worksheets. They complete assignments faster than you thought possible. Then you sit down to assess their learning. Just as you suspected, they weren’t truly learning as much as they could have. They were more focused on finishing than learning.
Young students often jump to the conclusion that the best way to do schoolwork is as quickly as possible. They race through their tasks in order to reach their free time.
When quick completion of the day’s school schedule becomes the main goal, the parent is met with shoddy results:
Clearly, these are not the sort of results we are looking for!
What can we do when we are dealing with students who are aggressively tackling their day’s assigned tasks, but are regularly making errors, failing to write neatly, and lacking the ability to recall what they’ve learned?
We need to change our homeschool’s culture and shift the focus away from completion to mastery — true learning.
We need to teach our kids that learning isn’t over simply because they’ve completed a book or project. They have learned something once they know it. They have mastered a particular topic
They will learn that assignments are not acceptable unless you can tell that they tried their best. Your kids will understand they need to turn in neat and accurate projects.
We need to teach our kids to value quality in their work. During the transition process, you as the parent will need to be extra firm, even when it inconveniences you. There will be times when you would much rather say, “We’re done with school today!” It's hard to extend the school day ans ask your child to redo a sloppily done handwriting page or error-riddled math worksheet.
The fantastic thing is that, as their parent, you know better than any other teacher when your child is and isn’t giving their schoolwork their best effort. When mastery of the material is our homeschool goal, it doesn’t mean that every assignment turned in will be perfect. It does mean that we are teaching our children to value a job well done rather than a job quickly done. We should work towards giving them the skills to identify for themselves whether they’ve actually learned the material.
When our family comes to adopt mastery of the material along with high-quality work as the primary goal in our homeschool culture, we can expect these sorts of results:
It is no small challenge to teach our children to value subject mastery and high-quality work. Our culture is moving ever faster toward surface-level learning where smart technology does all the real work. But this counter-cultural value is worth it.
Children who learn this value are able to press on even when learning is hard, rather than whine about getting schoolwork done faster. They know when they don’t know something—a most precious skill, indeed!
Creating a mastery-driven culture in your homeschool will not only lighten your load of everyday frustrations, but also hones your children's character.
While schools are trying to establish distance learning and redesign their curriculum, many families are beginning to look outside the public school system and turn toward homeschooling.
Some families have been on the fence about trying homeschooling, never really having a solid reason to take the risk before now. Other families are finding that the spur-of-the-moment fixes from local public schools are lacking, leaving them with more questions than answers. Still other families have felt that public schools aren’t right for their child for some time now and have been considering homeschooling.
Perhaps you have been on the fence about homeschooling or are curious about it. Or perhaps your children aren’t quite ready to begin school, but you’d love a chance for their first steps to be with you.
With the social distancing and schools closed across the nation now is the perfect time to try homeschooling if you've ever considered it. The pandemic provides an opportunity to give your child a good education and protect their health while reestablishing family bonds and fostering a love of learning.
Sonlight is a tried-and-true curriculum developed by professionals who ease you into homeschooling. You will feel confident and capable.
Sonlight delivers almost everything you need for the year right to your doorstep. You’ll get a huge box full of books and learning tools. You can choose from a wide variety of subjects and customize your order to your specific needs; from extra handwriting tablets to hands-on-crafts to science kits. There’s no need to go to the library or brave stores to hunt down books. It’s all there in one spot, ready to use. Thanks to the Instructor’s Guides, there is very little prep. You simply open and go.
If you are still unsure about homeschooling for the long term but want something to tide you over while you see what the future holds, look at Sonlight's new 6 and 8 week programs that help you finish the school year strong.
Sonlight has been helping homeschoolers teach for 30 years. They’ve grown and expanded considerably during that time and have become one of the leading award-winning companies in the homeschooling world. They take the time to listen to customers and have become more engaging, easier to use, and more diversified with each year. Sonlight tries to make the homeschooling process easy enough that almost anyone can do it with ease.
Sonlight uses a literature-based approach to learning, creating an atmosphere that makes learning (and teaching) fun. Rather than handing your child a stack of textbooks with matching workbooks to read and fill in, your children reads engaging books that capture their imagination and fill their head with knowledge.
Rather than spending hours grading workbook after workbook, you can sit down with your child and read story after story, creating a strong family bond and building a knowledge base that will strengthen their school experience for years to come.
Sonlight has Advisors available to assist you at every step of the process. From making your selection from a wide variety of subjects and electives to help with daily work, Sonlight offers help to users who are stuck on a topic or overwhelmed by the process. Get in touch with homeschool Advisors via online chat, email, and phone calls during business hours.
Or visit the Sonlight Connections Facebook group full of other parents who use and love Sonlight. They are happy to answer questions any time of the day, night, or even on weekends.
Sonlight offers a generous free trial book to help you get a feel for the program. If you would like to try more than a single book, but are still thinking about a short-term program, the new 6 and 8 week programs allow you to sample the full program, without having to make a long-term decision until you are ready.
If you order the full curriculum, Sonlight offers an even more generous guarantee, so if you find it’s not the right program for you, you risk very little. This guarantee will let you fully try homeschooling with Sonlight, and hopefully, fall in love with it.
Making the choice to homeschool can be very hard for some families, but it can also be very rewarding. By choosing a company that has years of experience and is highly ranked, you know that you are offering your child an outstanding education during an uncertain time.
In Sonlight’s kindergarten through second grade, Explode the Code (ETC) is offered as an optional resource. Although Sonlight’s Language Arts is sufficient in itself without ETC, I think Explode the Code is a notable resource which should be part of your curriculum choices.
Explode the Code teaches children how to follow instructions and to think critically. I would venture to say that most of our everyday teaching requires our children to follow instructions, but I have found Explode the Code reinforces the importance of following direction in a fun and rewarding way.
Some of the sections in the Ready, Set, Go series combine color recognition, penmanship, critical thinking skills, sound recognition, shape recognition, and creative thinking skills.
Critical thinking skills are one of the strengths within the numbered levels of this supplement as well. Each lesson offers exercises teach critical thinking skills in two ways:
Each lesson starts with a phonetic concept that helps students understand how to decode sounds and form words. The phonetic exercises of each lesson help students really grasp the concepts being taught both visually and audibly (with parental help).
The numbered Explode the Code levels combine visual learning with phonetic learning by associating a word with a picture. This allows the child to not only hear the word and see the word spelled, but also gives them a visual representation of the word. The pictures really help children who learn best with visual cues. The word-picture association really enhances reading and spelling skills.
Each lesson ends with a spelling page that challenges the student to remember how to spell certain words that they have learned within the lesson. Again the workbooks use the picture association. There are also exercises within the lesson that help students practice spelling with visual help. This is enough spelling for families who don’t want to add an extra spelling curriculum.
Because Explode the Code blends seamlessly with Sonlight Language Arts lessons, it's easy to use. As I mentioned before, Sonlight is excellent on its own alone, but it's enhanced with the extra practice found in these workbooks.
Sonlight schedules the ETC pages with just enough practice each day to benefit the student and encourage learning.
Sonlight Language Arts and Explode the Code lessons, if followed according to the Instructor’s Guide (IG), use the same words and sounds concurrently. This overlapping approach gives the student more time to grasp the concept being taught. There is a perfect blend of the two elements without overloading your child with too much work.
My children look forward to the ETC lessons and have benefited greatly from each workbook. Whether your children need extra practice or just need a fun way to learn letters, phonics, reading, writing, or spelling, ETC is a great resource. Do consider adding it to your next curriculum order!
Learn more about the Sonlight approach to Language Arts.
As a busy homeschooling parent with a full time job and many children to teach, I need a home cleaning routine that runs smoothly so I can focus on homeschooling my children. In other words, I need everyone to pitch in and help out.
To keep track of which child has which housekeeping duties, we’ve tried many different styles of chore charts—stickers charts, magnet charts, and laminated checkoff lists. I tried dividing chores based on age, drawing chores out of a bowl, and using a spinning wheel.
While all of these chore techniques were useful for a time, I quickly discovered that, for me, there were two main disadvantages.
Because large homeschooling families usually have several children ranging across a fairly wide age span, there is no way to make chores equal. A child of five can not be expected to wash the same amount of dishes to the same degree of cleanliness as a child of ten. A child of eight might be much faster at cleaning the same room as a child of four.
Instead of becoming a tool to help me focus my attention on homeschooling, chore charts quickly became an interruption. I had to track which child had which chores on which day. I moderated whose turn it was to wash dishes and whether I should count a meal using disposable plates or other unusual situations.
Children would interrupt a math problem to inquire whether today’s floor-sweeping assignment also included picking up the dust pile created. (I’m not sure why they even thought that was up for debate.) Or while I was working on spelling with one child, two others would be arguing over whether their chores were part of another child’s chore.
My children were always trying to demonstrate why their share of the chores was not fair.
Making those decisions is stressful for me. I need a way to assign chores without constantly having to arbitrate so I can focus my limited time on helping them with science and math.
Finally, I decided the fairest way I could assign tasks was to designate one room per each of my four children. The child would maintain responsibility for that room for an extended period of time, rather than constantly changing.
I also assigned each child their bedroom or their portion of their bedroom. I split the girls’ room into sections. One girl had her bed, the dresser, and the closet. The younger had her bed, the shelves, and floor. They were expected to straighten up their rooms twice a day.
Then I divvied up the rest of the house. We had a smaller house then, so I assigned the oldest child the dishes and kitchen, since she was really fast in cleaning those. My second child had the dining room and parents’ bedroom. My third child had the living room, and my fourth was responsible for bathrooms and hallways. She was four at the time, so her chores were limited to wiping down the sink and dusting.
Those chores have grown with them. The older they get, the more I expect a more complete job of cleaning their assigned area.
They keep these room assignments indefinitely. They are allowed, if both parties agree, to trade rooms. I’ve seen my oldest trade the kitchen and dishes for letting siblings use her iPad or agreeing to take them to the park. Even my youngest is pretty good at trading even though she doesn’t have a lot to barter with.
They can also establish a long-term trade. They are responsible for figuring out the trade and then telling me the terms of their agreement. We’ve had a few change-ups over the years.
Now, almost ten years later, our room assignments look like this.
Now any time I walk into a messy room, I know who needs to work. My children also guard their rooms, preventing messes from being formed, so they have less cleaning to do.
By teaching my kids to take responsibility for one room, I no longer have to worry as much about incomplete housework. We get more homeschooling assignments completed, and I spend less time moderating chore assignments.
I minimize toys, but with six children across a wide age span who are home more often than not, toys still seem to explode everywhere. When they bring toys into the living room to play with during read-alouds and then we hurry off to an appointment, it isn’t fair for the child assigned the living room to do all the cleaning when we return.
To cut down complaints of “It’s not fair” and “It’s not my fault,” I started dividing the clean-up of toys by type, rather than location.
All other toys are sorted by the children in charge of the rooms they are found in. But we try to limit the amount of overall categories and toys which don’t belong to one of the above categories.
This toys-by-type system allows them a larger selection, but allows them to quickly straighten them and put them away. No one is allowed to prevent siblings from playing with toys, as long as they play respectfully and clean up after themselves most of the time. But this cuts down on assorted pieces lying around or if no one claims responsibility for taking them out.
This system also works equally well for Sonlight science supplies (each child is responsible for their level’s science supplies), math manipulatives, and other educational materials.
By changing how I assigned chores, I was able to reduce friction and arguments in our house, teach children to fully clean an area regularly and thoroughly, and provide them with a sense of responsibility for keeping our family house organized. This non-chore chart method allows me more time and energy to homeschool and enjoy being with my children.
Wouldn't it be wonderful: to not have to worry about what you are doing each day for homeschool, but to simply do it?
With Sonlight's Instructor's Guides, you won't have to worry about scheduling, comprehension questions, activity sheets. None of it. Because we've already done it for you.
When I first started homeschooling, one attractive element of Sonlight’s curriculum was the fact that each age level contains missionary biographies or autobiographies.
Learning about the lives of missionaries—their successes, failures, hardships, and devotion— is awe-inspiring. That awe is something I wanted to introduce to my children.
In the eight years we have homeschooled, they have always begged for more missionary stories. I am thankful Sonlight makes these books a priority and includes them in each History / Bible / Literature level.
Missionary stories are thrilling, heartbreaking, encouraging, and sometimes hard to hear. But even the most heart wrenching events don’t need to deter us from reading them.
I know your family will benefit from them just as my family has for so many years. Here are three major benefits you will discover on your journey with each missionary.
Have you ever finished a book so inspired that you felt you would burst from elation if you didn’t act on the knowledge you just learned?
Missionary stories can inspire us to the point of action—towards other people, towards ourselves, or towards God.
There have been many, many family conversations that resulted from reading missionary stories. Those conversations have drawn us closer to God and helped us talk through hard spiritual questions. The testimonies of missionaries' lives have been an example of how we need to seek God and walk with Him daily, asking Him to use us to further His kingdom.
Sometimes real stories from real people help our children see their need for Jesus in their own life. These amazing testimonies still speak to us and point us to Christ. They also inspire us parents to be more devoted in our own relationship with Christ.
When we study geography or history, we can learn facts and figures and hope that we might remember them a week from now. But with the help of a true story—of real people, and real events in a certain place or time period, all the facts come to life.
The vibrant beauty of stories makex history more memorable. Missionary biographies introduce us to complex people, authentic culture, and one-in-a-lifetime experiences, that will fully educate us about the people in our world, past and current.
Not only do these stories draw us closer to God and help us learn about other people, missionary biographies also show us that there is a whole world of people out there to serve.
These inspirational stories challenge us to get beyond our comfort zone to help those in physical, emotional, and spiritual need. Reading the stories of these faithful, yet everyday, servants motivates us to follow suit.
What greater legacy to leave our children than to teach them how to serve and love others by looking for the needs around them and in the world beyond their boundaries?
Relive the amazing adventures of the godly men and women who have gone before us with an open heart, ready to allow God to use their story to challenge you.
What are you waiting for? Go grab your books, gather round as a family, and set off on an incredible journey with a missionary today and see the benefits that are waiting for your family.
See what's so amazing about a Sonlight education. Try Sonlight for free.
