Can the students work on this independently or have to be teacher led?

With Sonlight, your children will do a fair amount of work on their own. Math and Handwriting, for example, require independent work. But in Sonlight's areas of unique strength – History and Literature – the program will not work if parents hand it to their elementary (or most middle school) children to do on their own.
 
With Sonlight, you'll also be involved in the high school years, though to a lesser extent. Your high schoolers will take initiative; but after they've done their work, they'll get the most from the curriculum if you engage them in discussions about what they've studied and what they're thinking as a result.
 
The complete curriculum, including History, Bible, Literature, Language Arts, Science, and Math, requires the kind of parental time commitments mentioned at the start of each year's program description (about 1½–2 hours a day in the early years, 2–3 hours in the middle years and 1–2½ hours for older students).
 
Why?
 
Because it's Sonlight's purpose to equip you to pass on your values, your dreams, your worldview. As the Bible says, you should talk with your children about these things "when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up" (Deuteronomy 6:7, 11:19). In other words, you must invest a significant amount of time and actually talk with your children. And Sonlight equips you to make the most of that time.
 
We've done the lesson planning for you so you can invest almost all of your homeschooling time in direct interaction with your children, reading and talking.
 
But how do you ensure you talk about worthwhile things? In our opinion (borne out in practice): by reading a broad range of thought-provoking stories and experiences in Literature and History. This is exactly what customers get when they read Sonlight books.
 
Your steadying hand and thoughtful input as you read and discuss helps bind you to your children and them to you. As a result, they gain confidence in you and turn to you more readily for insight and guidance. You find yourself serving as trusted confidant – a privileged role that most parents would love to fill.