After designing the first version of Sonlight curriculum in 1995*, Rebecca Lewis began working on a new curriculum that would take the best of Sonlight (a global, theistic K12 curriculum) but package it into a one-room school house model. The advantages of this approach were:

1. You don't need a separate curriculum for each child: It's expensive to buy, time-consuming to prepare, and often puts an unrealistic demand on parents with large families.

2. The classroom works like a team: Older students help younger students. The parent does not need to be the expert in any subject but can learn together with the group. Learning is social and collaborative.

3. It builds on how children naturally learn: In the real world, learning is iterative. We don't learn everything in one go. Rather, we first learn building blocks of information. Then, we build knowledge. Finally, we apply that knowledge in wisdom. This was the central pedagogical insight to classical education (i.e. the Trivium): first learn grammar (information), then logic (knowledge), then rhetoric (wisdom). Similarly, K12Together uses a looping structure so students naturally progress from information to wisdom by revisiting the subject every four years.

In 2010, after 15 years of writing K12Together, Rebecca and her team were able to finish 60-70%. They decided that rather than leave it buried on a hard drive to share it with the world with the hope that others could use it and build upon it. If you would like to build on it or give feedback, contact us below.

(*Rebecca Lewis wrote the first four years of Sonlight Curriculum in 1989 with Sarita Holzmann, who turned Sonlight into the global family-blessing business that it is today. For more information about Sonlight, visit Sonlight.com)