History / Bible / Literature Programs

One of the best things about Sonlight is that your program comes with everything you need to use the books and materials with minimal prep time. We do this by providing an Instructor's Guide that contains your complete lesson plans, teaching resources, and notes for an entire school year.

The Sonlight Instructor's Guide turns the stack of books into a connected course of study: 36 complete, weekly lesson plans. Planning to attend a co-op one day a week? We offer a 4-day version in most of our packages. All your reading assignments, activities, notes, questions, all scheduled day-by-day. All you have to do each day is open the Guide, see what's scheduled, and do it!

Your Instructor's Guide (IG) interweaves History, Readers and Read-Alouds into your homeschool schedule. This resource makes it easy to determine how much is enough but not too much each day, and breaks those learning elements down into a daily schedule for you.

Thought-provoking notes in your IG spark discussion with your children and balance the biased statements you will find in literature. Vocabulary words, extra historical tidbits, and map and timeline activities help solidify your family's study of history, geography and literature. Learn more about Sonlight's award-winning Instructor's Guides.

Big Picture

Sonlight’s programs go through three cycles of history, nicely balanced between American and World History. Each time through, your children will gain a deeper understanding of what has happened and what God is doing. Since quality literature reaches children of various ages, you can use one HBL program with multiple children.

Sonlight also includes three years dedicated to important—but unusual!—topics.

• Sonlight level F focuses on the Eastern Hemisphere. The majority of the world lives here. And, even more importantly from the perspective of God’s Kingdom, this is the area in which the largest number of cultural groups live without a viable church movement (“unreached peoples”).
• Sonlight Level J focuses on the History of Science. Learn the stories of creative thinkers and surprising discoveries over the last several thousand years. Even if your children are not highly Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM)-oriented, this is a fascinating course. (And for the STEM-oriented students? A fantastic year!)
• Sonlight 200 focuses on the History of the Christian Church.

As much as possible, the Sonlight curriculum schedule interconnects the History, Read-Alouds, and Readers, so your children get an immersive experience in the historical period you study.

Daily Practice

A fascinating, story-based history book or series serves as the “spine” for each HBL program. You gradually read through this book, mostly moving chronologically through history.

If the spine is mostly text, you’ll also read an illustrated book so that your students get both a narrative and a visual history. For example, Hillyer’s A Child’s History of the World is a highly readable, engaging history book, but it lacks illustrations. Several Usborne books, filled with detailed illustrations, show children what Hillyer describes.

On top of the foundations of information and illustration, Sonlight’s History / Bible / Literature programs add additional books, mostly biographies and historical fiction.

As the Psalmist says, God's Word is "a lamp to our feet and a light to our paths." All of the Sonlight programs come from a Christian perspective. Throughout your studies, the Instructor’s Guide includes Scripture references and questions that seek to relate what you’re reading to your faith.

Sonlight also includes Bible as a separate subject.

At Sonlight, we believe that reading Scripture is the first and best way to know and love the Word. Each Sonlight program includes a Bible section in the Instructor's Guide schedule with a reasonable amount of Scripture reading so you spend time in God's Word every day. By the time they graduate, your children will have read through most of the Bible more than once.

The schedule also suggests a weekly memory verse. In the earlier programs, Sonlight is privileged to offer each week's verses set to song (HBL levels K-G). These albums seek to match the general feel of the corresponding program. So in Sonlight F, a program that examines world cultures, the album incorporates ethnic instruments and rhythms. Since music makes memorization easy, these albums allow your children to easily learn the Scriptures.

Besides Bible reading and Scripture memory, many Sonlight programs also include age-appropriate study books. Some of these are actual Bible study guides; some are books on discipleship and prayer; some are books of apologetics. Our desire is to help you and your children read, talk about, and memorize Scripture so that God's Word becomes integral to your lives.

That isn't all. Many of the Sonlight programs include a prayer guide for people groups around the world. We want your children to share God's heart for the world and change the world for Christ! Every year, Sonlight programs include at least one missionary biography. These books show how God is at work around the world, bringing transformation to those in His kingdom. How wonderful to witness that work, and to see how He uses ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things.

To learn Geography, you’ll locate the places you read about on your large Markable Map. The level K-J Instructor's Guides also include small laminated answer key maps with locations you learn about indicated. No atlas needed!

And the Sonlight Timeline Book has blank pages with dates from 5000 B.C. to the present. For Sonlight K through J, each History package includes pre-gummed timeline figures, with dates, to place in the Timeline Book. (In the programs for older students, Sonlight 100 to 500, the IGs include names, dates, and events to write in, without accompanying illustrated stickers.)

A filled Timeline Book is an amazing resource: not only a record of people and topics your children have studied, but a cumulative reference to understand history as a whole. As one small example: if you had placed the stickers from Sonlight levels K-D, your page from 1450 to 1475 would show Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, Michelangelo, and Aztec emperor Montezuma II. Also some major events: Muslims conquer Constantinople, Ponce de Leon seeks the Fountain of Youth, Balboa discovers the Pacific Ocean, and Vasco da Gama sails to India.

You get all of that in a Sonlight History program: a foundational book or two, additional biographies and historical fiction, geography studies, and a timeline to see the big picture.

Sonlight Read-Alouds begin in Preschool with beautifully illustrated picture books. By Sonlight A, the Read-Alouds are short chapter-books with some illustrations. Each year as the children get older, the Read-Alouds have fewer illustrations, and the books grow longer and have more complex plots. They often interweave with your history readings.

Carefully chosen to be age-appropriate, the Read-Alouds are weightier books than the Readers, with more challenging vocabulary and more thought-provoking topics. This way, you have a chance to explain things as you go along, to talk with your children about what you’re reading and what you’re thinking as you read. This is where true discipleship occurs, where you are talking with your children “when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 6:7).

In earlier Sonlight levels, we focus on selecting marvelous children's books. In the younger years, we want children to become captivated by exceptional books and inspire them with the joy of learning. We want them to love school—or, as some Sonlight parents have said, "My son doesn't even know we're doing school! He just figures we're having fun."

In the upper Sonlight levels, most of the Read-Alouds connect with the events, periods, and people that your child is studying in History. When you study WWII, for example, the Read-Alouds will include books set in occupied Holland or France, or reveal life in Britain during the Blitz.

Besides a dozen or so books of prose, each Sonlight program includes at least one book of poetry. Most of these are collections of outstanding poems by various authors, though some years a program focuses on a single poet. Poetry uses language in creative ways, and we're pleased to be able to share a wide variety of reading materials with your family.

Each Sonlight Reader package features fascinating and engrossing stories that will captivate your children’s interest and entice them to keep reading.

From the first Reader, the Fun Tales booklet “Pam” (which beginning readers can read after learning just six letters), Sonlight’s Readers grow progressively more challenging as your children increase reading fluency.

Readers in the early years use simpler vocabulary, simple sentence structures, short paragraphs, large fonts, and fewer words on a page than do Readers in later years. In the four Sonlight programs that correspond to early elementary school— Levels K, A, B, and C—you have six different Reader packages to choose from. Because children learn to read at different rates, you have options. And if you have children of different ages combined together into one program, you can choose separate Reader packages that will best meet each of your children’s unique abilities. If your children are a bit ahead of the curve, or a bit behind, you can choose a program that best meets each of your children's unique abilities. In later Sonlight programs, the Readers correspond with what your child is learning in History.

In Sonlight's high school programs, students transition to independent learning and all assigned literature is consumed as Readers. (However, some books are too good not to share, so some parents continue to read aloud to their children all the way through high school.)

Great books speak to a range of ages, so each Sonlight program can be used by students within several grades. This is especially helpful if you're teaching multiple kids! That's why we use letter labels for our programs, instead of numbers. If you'd rather shop by grade number, visit this page. 

When we use the word "program," we are usually referring to the History / Bible / Literature portion of the full Sonlight Curriculum. History, Bible, and Literature have always been the heart of Sonlight.

It doesn't end there! Sonlight carries materials to help you teach math, science, language arts, handwriting, and more. After choosing your Sonlight History / Bible / Literature program, shop by subject and find everything else that you need. For an even easier option, browse our All-Subjects Packages and get everything that you need for an entire school year in one easy-to-order package. 

Curious about Sonlight's scope & sequence through all History / Bible / Literature levels? Review the complete Scope & Sequence here.

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 in this homeschool history curriculum 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 homeschool history curriculum 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.

Sonlight's Language Arts programs are built around the books your student reads. Each program guides your children through well-paced writing activities based on the Readers they're already enjoying in their 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.

When your children were young, you taught them to speak as you spoke to them. In the same vein, children learn to write by learning from good models of writing – and trying out those models for themselves. We call this the "natural" approach to Language Arts. Want to learn more? Check out our Language Arts page.