Footprints and Sonlight

My children are ages 7, 5, 3, 1. I am not sure whether to buy Sonlight or Little Footprints. What would you advise? ~ Emma, Western Cape

Answer to Footprints and Sonlight

We both use Sonlight all the time with our own families, when we’re not taking a year off to use one of our 3 Footprints programmes.

• Little Footprints – South Africa in Stories (ages 4-8)
• Footprints On Our Land – South Africa’s Heritage (ages 7-12)
• Footprints into the 21st Century -(ages 12-16)

We both believe that it makes more sense to start little ones off with a study of their own home, then community, then country and then finally the world. Picture concentric circles moving out from the child!

…so in our experience, it has worked well to start off with Little Footprints and then move onto Sonlight A or B, which focus on World History…and then when you get to Sonlight Core D and E which focuses on American history for 2 years, you switch back to our next Footprints programme, Footprints On Our Land – South Africa’s Heritage.

I still do one year or 18 months of American history after that as I think America has such an influence on the world in terms of media, literature and politics that it is good to understand the background of the country.

Then we do Core F, G and somewhere in early high school its time for the final Footprints programme, Footprints into the 21st Century.

…so that’s what we recommend for combining Footprints and Sonlight.

To sum up, you might alternate between the them something like this:

In this video. Shirley and Wendy discuss how they combined and alternated between Footprints and Sonlight with each of their families.

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