Best Middle School Curriculum to Prep for High School

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Now, today, I want to talk specifically about Sonight’s H/B/L F, which includes history, Bible and literature. This H/B/L F is also referred to as Eastern Hemisphere Explorer. I believe that the Eastern Hemisphere Explorer (EHE) is the transitional linchpin of the entire Sonlight catalog. Oftentimes, this transitional core is overlooked because it seems unfamiliar. This lack of familiarity is actually the highlight. This curriculum spends an entire year covering the Eastern Hemisphere of the World.

Normally, I don’t spend a lot of time speaking about specific curriculums. My goal is to help homeschool families find the best tools to fit their specific needs. If you’ve listened to the podcast before, then you will know that I use a literature based curriculum provided by a company called Sonlight. 

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The Unsung Hero of the Sonlight Catalog Is Eastern Hemisphere Explorer – HBL F

Now, I am looking forward to our third run through Sonlight’s H/B/L F. In my opinion, it’s the unsung hero of the sunlight catalog. It is the doorway through which your child will pass from primary education to secondary learning. The stepping stone to a higher level of critical thinking. 

There are several vital reasons that this year long program is critical for any home scho

ol. Whether you’re using Sonlight’s traditional H/B/L format, using the books on their own. Or if you might be reading through the them as a suggested list. You could use the secular version of Sonlight’s curriculum through Book Shark. Either way, your whole family will benefit in several areas that I will share more fully in this blog post. 

Record Keeping and Creating Accountability

The first place your child will benefit from Eastern Hemisphere Explorer is by moving to independence as a student. The greatest transition begins with our instructors guide in the Sonlight curriculum. The Instructor’s Guide (IG) is a large binder that we refer to every day. It breaks down our reading assignments neatly into a Monday through Friday work week. Each book and chapter selections are written in daily grids for us to go over in the morning. We get an overview, then proceed through the work in the order we determine best for our school day. 

This year, I am handing over the reins of the instructor guide to my students. In the past, I, as the parent did all of the planning and prepping for the school day. It is not a lot of work for me because the Sonlight Instructor Guide is a well oiled machine. In the four inch binder you will find organized schedules of daily history, Bible and literature readings. Included are notes, discussion questions, map activities and much, much more. 

The Instructor’s Guide Has You Covered

This year, as we begin our work, I show my child the inner workings of the instructor guide. We look at how the notes are organized for each day. Together we explore the reference section and the appendices. Gaining familiarity with locations that contain resource materials as well as additional instructions for written work and reading assignments. In this transition, I’m giving my children more than just the responsibility to look up their assignments for the day; I’m giving them ownership of their learning experience. 

This step might seem like a small transition. As we’ve raised Sonlight students with this high school curriculum we have seen them become independent students. They are prepared to look at a college professor’s syllabus and know what’s expected of them from day one. There is no need for our kids to make a transition to college study skills. They have been responsible for their own assignments. They have the ability to negotiate their workload throughout their entire high school career. Eastern Hemisphere Explorer is where this process begins, and it is a beautiful gift to offer your student.

Transition to High School Level Work

The next place that they benefit from Eastern Hemisphere is that your students learn to keep their own records. Using the IG binder themselves, our children are check off their daily work. Each time they finish a reading segment or their discussion questions they go to the next thing. I created a simplified schedule you can download below. In it my kids can write in their daily work to create accountability for a weekly check out.

This helps our children see exactly what they’re supposed to do each day. Keeping their own records is a fundamental skill that they are going to need as they cross over into adulthood. I know that my son, in his junior year, worked for a carpenter. He needed to log his own hours to be sure to get paid. Keeping records is an important thing that our kids need to learn. Being accountable for their schoolwork is a great way to begin the transition of being responsible for their time frames. 

Honing Computer Research Skills

Eastern Hemisphere creates students who are ready for upper level learning. In the HBL they learn the foundational research skills they will need in their high school career. The Eastern Hemisphere Explorer Guide is a self-titled book by Sonlight. It guides your child through a companion notebook full of exercises. As your child reads through Eastern Hemisphere Explorer, they discover each new country and the rich history surrounding them. In the companion notebook journal, they write information as they seek out the facts they need to learn. This helps them mine more information, to research for longer reports and how to look for information in a text. 

Moving Into Non-Fiction & Higher Level Content

This is the first time that our junior high students are going to be moving into a “text-type” book. This is a great way to ease the transition for them and help them to be preparing for textbooks like those from Apologia Science or a higher level textbook that they’re going to use in their high school work. Eastern Hemisphere Explorer does this in a fun and creative way. They’re learning about new cultures and places and touching on a huge number of people groups along the way. Eastern Hemisphere Explorer starts in China and moves systematically through the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere, ending in Polynesia.

Let Your Kids Take the Lead

Another gift of Eastern Hemisphere Explorer giving our students the ability to be creative and to take ownership over their learning. Using the Eastern Hemisphere Explorer notebook, our Children are asked to decide on some of the countries they’re most interested in to create a longer and in depth report. This helps them articulate and share the information they’re reading in a textbook. They progress rom reading, to gathering in a notebook and then correlating information into a full length report, they’re beginning the process that they will be using in their upper high school work. The same process that my sons and daughter have used in their college level work. 

Watch Reluctant Writers Blossom

This is a great year to take a reluctant writer and help them transition because the structure is very strong. They don’t have to guess about what they’re writing. All the information is in front of them, so it’s easy for them to gather what they need to make a well written paper prepared for you. This is a great time for your students to work on computer research skills as well. In the earlier versions of Eastern Hemisphere Explorer, we used the World Book Encyclopedia online. Now, we use the Eastern Hemisphere Guide book created by Sonlight, but that doesn’t mean that your child can’t take the opportunity to research online about the places that you’re reading about in the Eastern Hemisphere Explorer. 

This would be a great opportunity to check your library and see if it makes World Book Encyclopedia available to you for free. Many resources are available through my local library, and World Book is one of them. There are tons of research tools and great mapping tools for your child to learn online. This transition into working online is sometimes the first place that our kids are going to be moving from games and activities to actual in depth research. 

This is also a time that I help introduce my children to keeping note cards next to them while they work on the computer. This is where they write the names of pages that they’ve gotten information off of, to research and where they’re going to keep track of Web links so that they can come back and see what information they’ve gathered that is useful for a report.

Record Keeping and Documentation

This habit of creating written documentation is going to help your children not only be responsible with their online time but help them create the documentation they need when writing papers for research. This is a skill that will take them all the way through college level and beyond. 

As a researcher and freelance writer today, I keep meticulous notes of articles that I’ve used as a reference as well. This is a skill they’ll use no matter what they do for a living.

In H/B/L F, we also experience a transition from story oriented learning, to fact based learning models. Now we’ve been experiencing nonfiction books all the way from our first pre-K homeschool experience. But H/B/L F gives our children an opportunity to read texts at a more difficult reading level. EHE carries more non fiction reading to prepare them for the high school level.

There are also more difficult reading passages, but they aren’t too difficult for your junior high student. The depth of the subject matter discussed in the text is more mature and the amount of information is presented at a higher level to prepare them for that next stage in their workload. 

Did You Pull Your Child From Public School?

EHE is a great way to prepare students for high school text, and this is why I constantly suggest that any parent who is removing their student from public school at the high school level use H/B/L F and the Eastern Hemisphere Explorer Project as a great way to lay a foundation for research and high school level work.

Our children have already gotten a strongly developed imagination from their reading in the past years with their Sonlight curriculum. This is why it shows a literature based curriculum in the first place, because the strong connection to their mind through reading aloud and reading themselves. 

Raising Fact Finders & Critical Thinkers

Eastern Hemisphere Explorer is also preparing them with the critical thinking skills they’ll need. We share the discussion questions provided in the IG. We have used these every year, but as they grow the discussion questions help our children have great conversations. One thing I have heard from my former home school students as they have become college students is that they are almost always in the small handful of students who participate in the discussions in their classroom. I directly attribute this to the comfort level they have achieved by using discussion questions in our daily reading. 

Throughout their entire Sonlight career, our children have been talking about what they’ve been reading. When a professor asks for input from a reading passage, our kids are not embarrassed. Nor did they think it’s odd or different to give their input on what they think about the subject. Sonlight has been training them to do that for years now. Eastern Hemisphere Explorer helps our students mine for facts as they’re searching through the text.

They’re looking for the information that’s asked of them, developing study habits and developing the ability to find what the question is really asking for. We’re no longer looking for the bold term or a list of vocabulary words. They are looking at a section of texts and translating that into an answer for the Eastern Hemisphere Explorer Notebooks Study guide. They are developing skills that they’ll use in their entire high school career. 

Looking for a Non-North America Centric Program

Now, one of the things I really love about Sonlight as a company is that they strive to avoid being North America centric. They got their start creating curriculum packages for overseas missionaries, so they made having a broad worldview a core value from the start.  Oftentimes, American students spend a short period of time studying other cultures and don’t get a chance to dig deep in other parts of the world. We’re spending a solid year studying the Eastern Hemisphere, and still that is barely enough to scratch the surface. The depth of history, the broad spectrum of people groups and the valuable things they will learn from different cultures and people will shape how my kids see their world. I want them to learn the many things other cultures have provided for our society today and identify the origins of ancient cultures and their modern counterparts. 

Shape How Your Children See the World

The development of higher learning came from the far East and it is one of the gifts we’re giving our children. When we dig into studying the Eastern Hemisphere, it is not a thing I take lightly. Given the racial atmosphere this world is experiencing right now, I would say this study is vital. This is our Children’s opportunity to dig into cultures they haven’t met, meet people, groups they’ve not heard of and an opportunity to find people groups around them today. This year you can identify where they have not reached out to other cultures or taken the opportunities to connect in their life in your neighborhoods. 

Eastern Hemisphere is a great time to stretch your capacity and expand your connections with the people around you. Overall, Eastern Hemisphere Explorer is a great core to use if you’re entering home schooling today. If you want to lay a foundation for a high school level, work if you want to lay a foundation to help your child research on their own through high school, sit with them this year, work with them through the research projects and use the ability to look up the answers online and in the workbook as a way to train your child to find the answers themselves. This is the skill they’re going to need not only for a successful high school career, but to be a successful student and successful in life beyond now.

Want Help Getting Your Own Homeschool Plan?

That’s a little bit of what I wanted to share about Sonlight’s, H/B/L F and the Eastern Hemisphere explore. There are many curriculum providers that provide literature based homeschool curriculums. I have a curriculum guide and reference list in my Home School Quick Startup Guide and that is available at www.InDueSeason.net. Our Homeschool Quick Startup Guide contains everything you need to answer your immediate questions and get you a strong start in your first home school year. 

Maybe you’re making a transition from public school to homeschool, and you’re not quite sure where to begin. This guide has all the answers, plus live links to any of the locations that I talk about. If I talk about a curriculum, I will have the link for it in the home school guide so you can click and find everything you need with one simplified resource at your very hands. You can download it today HERE. 

Thank you for joining me for this blog post.

I appreciate your time. 

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