Sonlight teaches history using great books. All of the Sonlight History / Bible / Literature programs use a book or series of books, as a "spine" – the foundational text that supports the rest of the program.
Sonlight programs flow from this principle. Each program guides your children through well-paced writing activities based on the Readers included in the History / Bible / Literature program. As your children grow, these activities will guide them through writing their first sentences, simple paragraphs and stories until they're eventually writing gripping creative works and compelling scholarly papers.
Each program uses a combination of highly illustrated books and books that are mostly text. This offers students both a narrative and a literal picture of history. To this foundation of information and illustration, the schedule adds additional books, mostly biographies, and historical fiction. When studying India, for example, you'll read about Mother Teresa, who showed the love of Christ to the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, and whose fellow nuns now work around the world.
Not quite done! Geography is also an integral part of Sonlight's program. Whenever you encounter a place name in your reading, we point it out in your Instructor's Guide. In Sonlight's K–H programs, we include small laminated maps with each location pinpointed so that you and your children can identify the locations easily.
Finally, Sonlight's history emphasizes the timeline. The Sonlight Timeline Book has blank pages with dates from 5000 B.C. to the present. For each History level, you'll fill in important names, dates, and events. A filled Timeline Book is an incredible resource – not only a record of people and topics studied, but a cumulative reference for history.