Introduction

I have enjoyed home schooling with Sonlight curriculum.  This blog has been created to show you how we enhanced our experience of Core F/5. The first time round, I did it in 2007/8 with my second daughter Lydia, who had been home schooled using Sonlight for 4 years prior to tackling Core 5 (as it was then). She was/is a child who loves books, is well motivated to study, and loved doing the Eastern Hemisphere Explorer (EHE) by herself, with little in the way of assistance required from me, other than highlighting the appropriate passages in the World Book Encyclopedia. It worked well for her, and we loved this core. She was 10 years old at the time.

Second time around, I did it on 2011/12 with my fourth daughter, Katie, who was also 10 at the time. She has been in French speaking Swiss school since the age of 6, and came home for one year to home school, in order to improve her written English (spoken English was normal for age.) She loved the books as much as Lydia, but really struggled with the EHE.  3 weeks in, I decided that, to make this year fun and accessible to her, I would have to abandon the EHE, and make it much more hands on.  For each country or region studied, we read the books, then added in art and cookery, as well as praying using the "Window on the World" which she had never used, as she'd never done Core 2.

Recently, I was speaking with a friend, who uses Sonlight, but for whose family English is their second language. She told me that one of her daughters was struggling with the EHE too. So, I thought this might be a more common problem than just limited to the two of us, and have decided to share the resources I used to make the year fun for Katie.  We are now a year down the line from finishing this core, so some of what we did is fading into the mists of time, but here are some of the things we enjoyed doing.

I hope you have as much fun as we did doing this core.