How Does Sonlight Choose the Readers in Its Curriculum?
Sonlight’s purpose and strategy when it comes to Readers is similar to the purpose and strategy athletes follow when they are in training. Athletes rarely push themselves to their absolute performance limit while they are training. Rather, they gear down just a fraction and do many repetitions or long sets of the slightly less taxing exercises. So it is in our Reading program. Rather than burdening students with books that always push them to the top end of their performance ability, we seek to give them lots of practice reading relatively low-stress, quality literature of all types literature that will engage their minds and hearts. We find that by pursuing this method, weak and reluctant readers are likely to become strong and eager readers… because they feel that reading is a privilege and not a chore. They look forward to their reading times. Students who are already capable and eager readers excel all the more because they enlarge their base of knowledge virtually painlessly. We
