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mariB
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| Posted: March 30 2007 at 5:28am | IP Logged
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Have any of you used this? We just read God King and it is off this list and it was fantastic. It would be fun to study that particular part of the Old Testament. We love to read together.
I've never used Sonlight and I'm one that doesn't stick to lesson plans too well. Can this be used "loosely"?
Thanks
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Bookswithtea
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| Posted: March 30 2007 at 7:13am | IP Logged
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If you are comfortable with not letting a schedule steal your joy, you can definitely use this loosely. I am taking 3-4 years to cover cores 6 and 7 (second time around). Story of the World is on audiocd at www.peacehillpress.com. The first volume of SOTW is fine. The second has anti Catholic problems (reformation oriented), and the third and fourth are also known to have problems, but I think they are easy enough to work around. I've added in lots of Bethelehem Books and saint stories. The Usborne book is interesting. If you decide to use the Foster books, I would recommend reading them aloud, and the 5 day book Columbus and Sons is pretty notoriously anti Catholic (no problems with Augustus Caesar's World). I've added in a few chapters from Old World and America and The Story of the Church to compensate for the protestant bent, and we ditched all the protestant hero stories as well as the bible study books. Peace Hill Press also has activity books (coloring pictures, maps, etc) to go along with each level of SOTW and quizzes, if that appeals to you. Oh! I just remembered, Eleanor of Aquitaine has a pretty horrible presentation of purgatory and the Catholic view of salvation (sigh...Eleanor was Catholic so people think this is what we actually believe when they read it!  ) Mary Bloody Mary has some references to illegitimate children in a common slang term and briefly talks about her fear of being taken advantage of (using the more common term as well), and Catherine Called Birdy is often dropped by SLers but I can't remember why at the moment. :-) Sonlight has a lot to offer but its common for them to use books that deal with mature subjects without warning you ahead of time.
If you aren't sure you want to take on the IG, you could always buy SOTW and then just read the readers/read alouds that appeal to you.
If you decide to buy from Sonlight, I would recommend taking the time to read the discussion forum for this core. Moms have posted all sorts of stuff and you will have your 'head's up' for most things of concern.
Let me know if I can help with anything else. 
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mothering ds'93 dd'97 dd'99 dd'02 ds'05 ds'07 and  due 9/10
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Natalia
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| Posted: March 30 2007 at 7:49am | IP Logged
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I have a slightly different perspective regarding Story of the World- I don't find them anti- Catholic. For me anti Catholic is something that is done on purpose to make the Catholic Church look bad. I don't think is the case. The perspective is different than a Catholic perspective and to get that (the Catholic perspective) you have to add other resources. I find the STOW pretty balanced -maybe I am just naive...
I do think that SL 6 covers a lot of material. It has taken us five years to cover that material (and we are not finished). I have taken my time adding resources from the STOW activity guide and some documentaries to the mix. We are still on the Victorian Age :-)
Natalia
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Elizabeth
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| Posted: March 30 2007 at 9:38am | IP Logged
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Bookswithtea wrote:
If you aren't sure you want to take on the IG, you could always buy SOTW and then just read the readers/read alouds that appeal to you.
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This is what I've done. I've used SOTW, the activity guides to go with it, Sonlight readers and Bethlehem books for the time period. I no longer even look at my Sonlight IGs because I end up hyperventilating every time I do  .
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Elizabeth Foss is no longer a member of this forum. Discussions now reflect the current management & are not necessarily expressions of her book, *Real Learning*, her current work, or her philosophy. (posted by E. Foss, Jan 2011)
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Bookswithtea
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| Posted: March 30 2007 at 4:02pm | IP Logged
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Natalia wrote:
I have a slightly different perspective regarding Story of the World- I don't find them anti- Catholic. For me anti Catholic is something that is done on purpose to make the Catholic Church look bad. I don't think is the case. The perspective is different than a Catholic perspective and to get that (the Catholic perspective) you have to add other resources. I find the STOW pretty balanced -maybe I am just naive...
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I hear you. In this case, by anti Catholic I meant that there are sections in the book that misrepresent history in favor of protestantism and against Catholicism.
Here are some examples from a review I wrote a long time ago (Natalia, I know you've seen this before. I just thought it would help the original post-er).
Page 154—A story of William the Conquerer is recounted…it is about how he hid relics under a table and tricked someone into swearing to give power to him “over the relics” so that he would be stuck. The definition of relics is given as follows:
“saints remains, which were thought to have miraculous powers.”
Page 331—The introduction of Luther into history:
“…but Martin Luther (ML…my shorthand) decided to join a monastery instead. As a monk, he had to beg for food and money. He spent long hours praying and studying the Bible. ML chose this difficult, demanding life becaue he was afraid that God would punish him for his sins unless he worked day and night to make God happy. He wrote that he was ‘walled around with the terror and agony’ of God’s wrath.
ML did everything that the church told him he should do. He went on pilgrimmage to Rome. He prayed in front of the relics of saints. He crawled on his hands and knees, reciting the Lord’s prayer, to show how sorry he was for his sins. But he was still afraid that God would be displeased with him.
…(he said to himself)’The book of Romans doesn’t tell me that I have to earn God’s love by working hard to be good. No, no! It says that God gives me the power to believe in him, and the power to be good, because he already loves me!’ This changed ML’s way of thinking about God! (emphasis in text)”
And then an analogy is made where a child has 2 aunts and one is picky and expects perfection and is cruel toward the child who fails to be clean enough. The other is kind and welcomes the child even with a little bit of mud. And then the question is posed,
“Which aunt would you rather go see? The first aunt is a little bit like the way ML used to think of God. The second aunt is more like the way he learned to think about God after reading Romans.”
It continues a few pp’s down:
“The Catholic church had begun to teach that God would only forgive sins if the sinners did penance, special deeds (like giving money to the poor or confessing their sins in public) to show how sorry they were. But the Church also taught that sinners could get out of doing penance by paying a certain amount of money to the Church. This practice was called selling indulgences.
Martin Luther believed that indulgences were wrong. He preached that God would forgive any sinner who believed in Jesus Christ, not just those who did penances or bought indulgences.
Page 341-342—The definition of a Renaissance Man (something described positively in the text) is explained as follows:
“When Prince Henry the Navigator sent ships south to see the southern waters, rather than just accepting the old stories about boiling seas, he was thinking like a Renaissance man. When Columbus insisted on going to India by sailing West, instead of trying to go around Africa like everyone else, he was acting like a Renaissance man. When Martin Luther told the people of Wittenberg that they should look at the Bible for themselves, instead of believing everything that the Church told them, he was talking like a Renaissance man.” She goes on to link Renaissance thought with the great Scientific Method.
344—On trusting priests versus reading the Bible for oneself (in the Gutenberg press section)
“Suppose that you are a Christian who wants to find out what the Bible says about right and wrong. But you don’t have a Bible. There’s a huge Bible chained to the pulpit of the church in your village, but it’s written in a language you can’t read. So you ask your priest what the Bible says. He doesn’t read very well either, so he tells you what his priest told him years ago when he asked the same question. He might be right—or he might be wrong.
That’s what life was like in Europe during the Middle Ages. Because there were so few books, scientists didn’t make very many new discoveries. Historians couldn’t find out much about the past. Doctors knew very little about the human body. And Christians had to found out what the Bible said by asking their priests. They had to trust their priests to give them the right information! (emphasis in text)”
346—Vernacular Bibles—The paragraph ends with “And Christians could read their own Bibles written in their own languages.”
(My understanding is that there were Catholic vernacular bibles at the time)
Page367-368—“Good Queen Bess” The basic gist is that she restored protestantism and didn’t allow Mass to be said, but other than that, was a good queen and allowed Catholics to remain Catholic. (there was an awful lot of Catholic persecution under the reign of Elizabeth II)
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Blessings,
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mothering ds'93 dd'97 dd'99 dd'02 ds'05 ds'07 and due 9/10
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Bookswithtea
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If you run a search here, there is a great post by Kelly (?) I think about problems with SOTW III, and on the Sonlight forums, there have been many women complaining about accuracy issues with Volumes III and IV, particularly in regards to Australia and New Zealand. I wish I had saved the posts. I only remember there were problems, but not what the problems were. A mom from either Australia or NZ took the time to give the correct information on the forum.
In all fairness, there is no perfect history text. Every one will have problems, inaccuracies, biases. I am grateful for the SOTW books because they are interesting. We just skip a few chapters here and there, and substitute with other books. I find it helpful to know ahead of time where the problems may lie so I usually preread texts before using them.
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Blessings,
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mothering ds'93 dd'97 dd'99 dd'02 ds'05 ds'07 and due 9/10
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mariB
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Thank you so much Bookswithtea and everybody! I have the SOTW on CD's and we have used the first book and part of the second SOTW book. I would love to use the Bethlehem books and the Saint books. We have been doing some saint books and Bethlehem books as read alouds and it has been so enriching!
I will pray about Sonlight 6 as I don't want to put all that money out just to waste it. We have been homeschooling for 8 years and I have so much stuff that I really want to be careful of spending money. (One of my lenten and future sacrafices.) I LOVE books.
Two things have been stopping me from doing Sonlight money and LESSON PLANS.
Thanks.
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Bookswithtea
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| Posted: March 30 2007 at 8:31pm | IP Logged
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mariB wrote:
I will pray about Sonlight 6 as I don't want to put all that money out just to waste it. We have been homeschooling for 8 years and I have so much stuff that I really want to be careful of spending money. (One of my lenten and future sacrafices.) I LOVE books.
Two things have been stopping me from doing Sonlight money and LESSON PLANS.
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It took several hours during the summer, but it wasn't hard to coordinate books with SOTW. I used the table of contents and skimmed the chapters, looked on my shelf for the books I already had, and then I picked the books from Bethlehem, Emmanuel, and Sonlight that most appealed to me. Ds is a strong reader, so I scheduled one reader a week. The Usborne book that SL uses is nice, but I don't think its necessary at all. I never plan for more than 28-30 weeks of history because I tend to overpack each week. We don't have a prayer of finishing if I schedule 36 weeks. I also don't plan for history to be 5 days a week. I planned 4 the first time, but in the future, I'll plan 2-3. I'm soooooooo guilty of overkill with my oldest. I've found that following SL's schedules makes me crazy, but my own schedules are usually doable since they are planned with our other activities and workload in mind.
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mothering ds'93 dd'97 dd'99 dd'02 ds'05 ds'07 and due 9/10
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mariB
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| Posted: March 30 2007 at 8:56pm | IP Logged
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Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Bookswithtea. It works much better if I plan 2 to 3 days a week of history reading. That is what we do now. You made me feel so much better about what we are doing.
You know, the most important time of the day for us is Rosary, Mass readings and a Saint book. It has been a blessing for our family and has brought us great joy--especially for me. I don't want to lose that by trying to cram lots of history reading in!
Plus, I love keeping it Catholic!
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Bookswithtea
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mariB wrote:
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Bookswithtea. It works much better if I plan 2 to 3 days a week of history reading. That is what we do now. You made me feel so much better about what we are doing.
You know, the most important time of the day for us is Rosary, Mass readings and a Saint book. It has been a blessing for our family and has brought us great joy--especially for me. I don't want to lose that by trying to cram lots of history reading in!
Plus, I love keeping it Catholic! |
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From what you've said, it sounds like you will do just fine without buying an entire core. The SL Catalogue is a wealth of information for doing your own thing!  If you want to, you could coordinate your saint readings to SOTW II especially. So many saints from that time period. I love Emmanuel too because they list all their books by time period. One of the SL books is historical fiction about St. Patrick. That one is definitely worth buying.
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Blessings,
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mothering ds'93 dd'97 dd'99 dd'02 ds'05 ds'07 and due 9/10
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florasita
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| Posted: April 26 2007 at 4:42pm | IP Logged
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We use sonlight and I personally love the schedule . I may miss a day here and there but it is really what I personally needed .
I think it really depends as well what ages you would be using core 6 for . I personally find sonlight cores are not at gr level and most people mistake that . They are to be used for what level you feel your child is at . We used core alt 6 for ds 16 & ds 15 for highschool . It was perfect for that age . Some would disagree and say it is not a highschool level but our kids are not university bound either it was a good fit for them . We do CM LA so I did not personally have any issues with the LA . I like that sonlight provides us with some ideas and questions etc. to make us think because frankly sometimes my brain is frizzled .
I also as a missionary will not always have access to a library and be able to go hunt books down if we are living out of the trunk of a car etc. if we ever are overseas I can order it all in a box .
My boys can handle anti catholic stuff at that older age . The younger years I'm reading all the books with the kids .
There is a sonlight yahoo list you could check out if you like .
The sonlight schedule did not take the joy out of my life . Personally it saved me from worry and burnout 
Much Love , Rox
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May I rise & rest with words of Gratitude on my Breath
May I have the Heart & Mind of a Child in my Depth
May I forever remember to be a Light
May Peace Love & Hope be My Sight
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folklaur
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There is also Alt-6, which is a one-year world history course, which uses a different text as its spine. Well, at least I know it used too, I think it still does....
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4Real Forums : Across Time and Place
Topic: Sonlight core 6
