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We find that many families enhance their homeschooling adventure with a day of music lessons, sports, field trips, or other extra curricular activities during the school week. Other families may desire a slower paced school schedule than our standard 5-day program provides. So to meet the needs of these families, Sonlight developed the 4-day program option. We removed only the assignments that least impacted the overall foundation of the program, without losing any quality of the content. Some books were entirely removed from the schedule while others were shortened so you read a bit less. This way you have an extra weekday to do the other things that are important to you!

The 4-day program has a 144-day yearly schedule versus the 180-day yearly schedule in the 5-day program. You should check with your local education authorities to make sure you fulfill your state's requirements. Some Sonlighters spread the 4-day program over 5 days to best fit their lifestyle. That is certainly an option for you as well!

Every Sonlight Core with this option comes with both 4-day and 5-day schedules in your Instructor's Guide. You choose which will best fit your family. With the 5-day program you can always switch to the 4-day schedule if that proves to be beneficial for your family.

A couple things to note:

• For the lower elementary levels, our Grade K-2 Readers come only with a 5-day schedule because we believe children who are learning to read should practice daily. We desire for your students to learn to love to read and thus will enjoy opening a book each day.
• In our Language Arts programs, students complete 4 days of creative writing activities a week. The optional fifth day is filled with lighter, fun activities designed to develop skills through play: puzzles, palindromes, games, and more.

Many traditional schools — and at least one popular homeschool curriculum provider — boast that their curricula have "no gaps." They imply that the students who use their curricula will acquire "complete" educations, as it were, with no missing pieces.

We find this claim puzzling because we wonder how any child can be taught "everything" there is to know by the youthful age of 17 or 18.

Furthermore, we consulted several standard scope-and-sequences when we first began to develop Sonlight^®, and we quickly realized that no two curricula completely agree when it comes to "what our children ought to know." Even those curricula that claim to have "no gaps" have differences between them!

And so we decided we could not create a curriculum with "no gaps" and, therefore, we would not worry overly much if our scope-and-sequence failed to match exactly the scope-and-sequence of any particular traditional school. Rather, we decided we would seek to meet the needs of evangelical Christians who want their children to grow up loving to learn.

We figure the most important thing we can do is to instill in children a sincere love for learning. That way, students will continue learning — because they want to continue learning — even after they've completed their formal "school" educations.

And later, they can pick up whatever information they happened to miss during their school years. Far better to lack a few facts and love to learn than to have all the "right" information and hate the learning process!

Sonlight^® was designed from the ground up to capitalize on the efficient, tutorial environment of the home.

We at Sonlight want your children to learn, but, even more important, we want them to have fun learning. And we want them to learn how to learn--how to find information and solve problems--so they're well equipped for adulthood.

Because homeschool parents are in daily, personal, one-on-one contact with their students (unlike the relationship that exists between most classroom teachers and their students), we expect that, in general, rather than using quizzes, tests and gradable worksheets, homeschool parents will evaluate the progress of their students through other means.

When you're reading a book, you'll likely discuss it with your son or daughter: "Why do you think he wanted to do that?" "What does ____ mean?"

If your child is able to answer your questions, you know exactly how much s/he understands--or how much s/he fails to understand.

And you and your child enjoy a mutually satisfying conversation to boot!

Over the years, we've added more formal means for you to evaluate your children's progress and to give them the focusing benefit of tests and quizzes. Still, our evaluation methods are generally less formal--and certainly a lot simpler--than you would find in a classroom-oriented program.

We are convinced our tools will give you all the information you need and your children all the practice they require.

We do not have a specific history program set up for our Canadian customers. However, we recommend you purchase a one year condensed version of our history programs and spread it out over two years. That way you can add in whatever Canadian specific history you wish to cover.

Get more ideas on customizing your Canadian history program on the Sonlight^® Forums: https://forums.sonlight.com/forumdisplay.php?f=136

You are also welcome to purchase your subjects separately. However, you would not be able to take advantage of our 10% discount offered through a Core or Multi-Subject Package purchase. This is why most Canadian customers opt to purchase the whole Core program, and then resell the history portion they will not use.