Your e-book on transcripts changed my life this year, and thus, the lives of my children! My oldest is in 8th grade and earlier this past school year, she thought she wanted to go to high school. I wasn't sure what to do for high school, so I was having trouble getting her excited over the idea of remaining homeschooled. I saw your book, ordered it in December, but did not get around to reading it until about February. That is when things started to change in two ways. I was able to share my excitement about your e-book with my oldest, especially your transcripts with Sonlight courses, as we have used Sonlight in the past and really liked it. We attended various homeschool meetings with co-ops to get high school ideas, and over the course of 4 months, we have decided to homeschool all 3 kids, the middle one coming to me out of the blue in March and asking if she could homeschool again (she had 1 year previously).
I especially like some advice you have given to stay with curriculum you have already successfully used. For us, that would be Sonlight. However, a few things have come up lately making me question that. Do you think I'd be compromising my own beliefs by using Sonlight for history/literature, even though it bothers me that, as a company, they won't take a stand on the old earth/young earth issue? Would you even recommend trying 3 separate Sonlight cores and work 4 hours a day?
~Lily in Idaho
I did write a blog post on the creation-evolution issue earlier.
We used Sonlight through Core 100, and then we had read all the books, so I had to branch out on my own. My son worked at Discovery Institute as an intern at the think tank responsible for much of the intelligent design debate. He has worked closely with many of their writers, including Jay Richards of Privileged Planet, etc. We had MANY discussions in our home about creation, evolution and "intelligent design." Because of that, Alex was able to pass a CLEP exam in Biology - carefully noting all the "icons of evolution" included on the test. We used Apologia, so my children had the science background for new earth. When I was talking to my son a few months ago, he wished that we had presented MORE non-new-earth material. He wanted to have more information so he would have been better prepared to handle it in discussion from school with evolution and old-earth students. I think at a college level, you really want them to be prepared with more information, rather than less. Of course it's a huge balance, because you don't want to freak out the younger children while you are instructing the older children in wisdom.
Here is how I look at it. You want them to learn the information so they don't totally do a 180 in college. You don't want them to think it's like Santa Claus, and they can't trust you anymore. So more information is better. At home, at least you can talk about it and better prepare them to have their beliefs challenged (as they will be at some point, whether they go to college or not.) In my opinion, it's better to use mildly-evolutionary material and discuss it rather than young-earth-only material and have them flip out when they are first experiencing the other viewpoint without their parents around to guide them.
As far as using three levels of Sonlight goes, I didn't interact with my children and their schoolwork in the older grades. Still, three levels DOES sound difficult. It can at least help to study the same time period if you use different cores, so your supplemental experiences and field trips and coordinate. But speak to a Sonlight Rep to get a better response. I don't think I would eliminate a curriculum because of a mild disagreement if it is working. You're right, there will ALWAYS be some belief issues in ANY curriculum - nothing will be a perfect fit. Instead of completely changing to a different curriculum, you might want to try a SIMILAR curriculum, like Tapestry of Grace. It's also literature based, but all ages can work together. You might want to also consider reading Managers of Their Homes over summer, so that you can learn strategies for making your homeschool coordinate with your job.
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