Homeschool: Kindergarten Year
I wanted to record what we are doing for homeschool this year. I love this blog for documenting everything and maybe it will give me ideas in the future because I’m sure I won’t remember what we did when Israel is five. :)
So with Esther’s charter school she attends one day per week. They cover science and history as well as art, drama, music, STEM and some social/emotional skills classes. I have mixed feelings about her charter that I won’t go into in this post. But she loves it so I will probably let her continue attending for the rest of Kindergarten.
At home, on the other four days of the week, I cover reading/language arts, and math. I am still learning so much about homeschool and finding what works best for us. One thing I
am learning is that I can NOT give into the temptation to schedule too much. People are worried about socialization for homeschooled kids, but there is honestly soooooooo many clubs and homeschool groups and co-ops and extra curricular activities to choose from
that a I have found myself having to say no to a lot. (And saying no/FOMO is a struggle for me). We still have Baby Boy’s visits 2x a week, so that takes up some of the schedule. Esther was also doing a flow rider class these past 5 weeks but that is ended now. We won't have her in any other extra circulars for a few months at least.
Anyways now on to what we actually do. When deciding what we do have time for I had to let go of most of the fun ideas I had imagined for homeschool, at least for now. There are a plethora of ideas and activites out there on the internet, but there are just not enough hours in the day to do everything. The most essential things to me is are instill a testimony of Jesus Christ and a love for learning for my children. With that in mind I decided that the three things that are most important for us everyday are 1. Morning devotional 2. Time spent in nature and 3. Reading. I’ll talk more about each of these below, and I am not amazing at fitting each of these in each day, but having them listed as my 3 top priorities has been helpful for me in deciding what to say yes and no to. Also, Esther is only in kindergarten, as I have to keep reminding myself. In many countries (in in the United States until recent history) children did not go to school until age 6. Kindergarten is still not even legally required in most states. So I try to keep the academic load light and leave lots of time for play, play and more play because play is the best way for young children to learn.
I created this little checklist to help Esther and myself know what we need to do each day. We usually do morning devotional and language arts before lunch. Then we eat lunch while I read from our current read aloud book. Then the girls usually have a show or sometimes play together while I nurse Israel down for nap. Once Israel is asleep we do handwriting and math and we are done for the day. Altogether "school time" usually takes about 1.5-2 hours, but really I know we are learning throughout the day so there are many things we do that can be considered "school".
Handwriting
Esther is pretty advanced in her handwriting so I don't worry about this one too much. We do the workbook her charter school provided and do it 2-3 times a week.
Math
For math we also use TGTB. I actually ordered the level K when Esther was four and started working on it with her then. She loved it and we did about thirty lessons before taking a break. This fall we picked it back up and she has been loving it again. We did try out another curriculum that her school provided, Mcgruffy Math. We like TGTB better so we mostly use that and occasionally do Mcgruffy if we are short on time.
Time Spent in Nature
I have always loved being outside, I grew up playing outside tons, and I want my kids to grow up that way too. However, it has been harder than I imagined getting them outside every single day, preferably for a few hours a day. Although ideally I would love to live in a mountain home with lots of land that my kids could safely explore, that is not our current reality and probably never will be. However, I am glad to live in a house with a backyard, in a safe neighborhood with parks close by, and mountains and hiking and many outdoor activities near by. I know there are so many benefits for children (and people of all ages) for spending time in nature, it can be hard to accomplish it, especially with two babies. But I still try. We try to make it to Free Forest School every week, and if we don't make that we almost always go to a park when Baby Boy has his visits. We also have a pass to our local nature center and that has been huge blessing. It is a place I can take the kids and feel safe to go "hiking" by ourselves. They also have a lot of weekly programs for kids that the girls like going to. Some days it is all I can do to take the kids on a walk to the park or to just let them play in the backyard for twenty minutes. Some days we don't get outside at all, especially if it is cold. On those days I just have to try and give myself grace and not feel too guilty about it. As the kids get older we will probably add in some type of formal nature study/nature journaling to our curriculum, but for now that feels too overwhelming so we are starting with the goal of just getting outside everyday.
A few of the books I'd recommend for learning about the benefits of outdoor play are
The Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv
Barefoot and Balanced by Angela J Hanscom
There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather by Linda Akeson McGurk
Reading
Reading has always been a love of mine and since they were babies, I have tried to instill that love into my children. We have many books in our home and the children's bookshelf sits front and center in our living room. Just like being outside, reading to children has so many documented benefits, academically, emotionally and relationaly between parent and child. We have always read picture books and bedtime and throughout the day and taken trips to the library every week. That aspect is already ingrained into our family culture so it has been easy to add in chapter book read-alouds during lunch as part of our school day. I had already started reading a few chapter books to Esther since she was about four. Now we are much more consistent though. So far, with Esther and Adele I have read Peter Pan (classic starts edition), The Little House in the Big Woods, The Courage of Sarah Noble, Charlotte's Web, The Little House on the Prairie, Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg, Kirsten's Birthday, and we are currently reading Kirsten Learns a Lesson. Usually I give them two choices for a chapter book and let them choose between them. If I am going to spend hours reading them a book I want to make sure it is a high quality book that I enjoy too. The Good and the Beautiful Curriculum puts a big effort on reading high quality literature. I appreciate that even though I think their standards are a little outrageous at times. Still I use their booklist to find good books that I know will be uplifting for me and the girls. I love reading books with a good Christian message and I feel like that is really hard to find in children's books nowadays. For the rest of this school year I am planning to read the girls Heidi, and Winnie the Pooh and I am sure we will read a few more than those too.
If you are looking for books to read about the benefits of reading aloud with your children, I'd recommend
Honey for a Child's Heart by Gladys Hunt
The Read Aloud Family by Sarah Mackenzie
Along with reading I have started trying to introduce poetry to the girls. Here are videos of them reciting their recent memorized poem.
As I stated earlier, I am still learning a lot about homeschooling. We are 8 weeks into our homeschool experience so I am by no means an expert. Most pressing right now is I am still trying to figure out how and what to do with Adele to help her not feel left out when I spend so much time working with Esther. I am thinking I am going to start a preschool curriculum with Adele so she can have her own special school time with Mom too. I don't want to do anything too academic, but just something fun that is also not too much work, if such a thing exists. If you have any preschool curriculum recommendations please send them my way. :)
I am grateful that I am able to homeschool my children right now. I know most people don't want to or understand the urge to want to homeschool, but it really is so enjoyable and fulfilling to me. I love teaching my children and I love being with my children each day.
Our homes are the ultimate setting for learning, living, and becoming. -Elder David A Bednar
So with Esther’s charter school she attends one day per week. They cover science and history as well as art, drama, music, STEM and some social/emotional skills classes. I have mixed feelings about her charter that I won’t go into in this post. But she loves it so I will probably let her continue attending for the rest of Kindergarten.
At home, on the other four days of the week, I cover reading/language arts, and math. I am still learning so much about homeschool and finding what works best for us. One thing I
am learning is that I can NOT give into the temptation to schedule too much. People are worried about socialization for homeschooled kids, but there is honestly soooooooo many clubs and homeschool groups and co-ops and extra curricular activities to choose from
that a I have found myself having to say no to a lot. (And saying no/FOMO is a struggle for me). We still have Baby Boy’s visits 2x a week, so that takes up some of the schedule. Esther was also doing a flow rider class these past 5 weeks but that is ended now. We won't have her in any other extra circulars for a few months at least.
Anyways now on to what we actually do. When deciding what we do have time for I had to let go of most of the fun ideas I had imagined for homeschool, at least for now. There are a plethora of ideas and activites out there on the internet, but there are just not enough hours in the day to do everything. The most essential things to me is are instill a testimony of Jesus Christ and a love for learning for my children. With that in mind I decided that the three things that are most important for us everyday are 1. Morning devotional 2. Time spent in nature and 3. Reading. I’ll talk more about each of these below, and I am not amazing at fitting each of these in each day, but having them listed as my 3 top priorities has been helpful for me in deciding what to say yes and no to. Also, Esther is only in kindergarten, as I have to keep reminding myself. In many countries (in in the United States until recent history) children did not go to school until age 6. Kindergarten is still not even legally required in most states. So I try to keep the academic load light and leave lots of time for play, play and more play because play is the best way for young children to learn.
I created this little checklist to help Esther and myself know what we need to do each day. We usually do morning devotional and language arts before lunch. Then we eat lunch while I read from our current read aloud book. Then the girls usually have a show or sometimes play together while I nurse Israel down for nap. Once Israel is asleep we do handwriting and math and we are done for the day. Altogether "school time" usually takes about 1.5-2 hours, but really I know we are learning throughout the day so there are many things we do that can be considered "school".
Morning Devotional
We have been consistently doing morning devotional since we started the new Come Follow Me curriculum in January. Each day our morning devotional consists of a hymn, a prayer, a scripture we are currently memorizing, and reviewing one or two we already have memorized, then a lesson. At the beginning of the New Testament study it was easy for me to teach a lesson each day of the week from the manual, there were so many parables and stories of Jesus that there was a lot to work with. Now that we are in the pauline epistles it is a little more difficult to pull a lesson out of it for a 3 and 5 year old. So we rely a lot on The Friend, and sometimes we just read a story from either The Friend or from The Children's Book of Virtues which I found at DI. Then we say the pledge of allegiance. I try to keep morning devotional short and joyful (if not fun or entertaining) for both girls. Adele fully participates in morning devotional and usually doesn't participate much for the rest of school (more on that later).
Language Arts
For Language Arts we use The Good and the Beautiful. We used their Pre-K and K Primer curriculum for Esther too and she really likes them. I am a f"ollow the curriculum to a T' kind of person so I like that their cirricuclum tells the parent exactly what to say, and it is all in one workbook. Esther is doing the level K book now and has really been excelling in it. At the beginning it was slightly too hard so we ordered the Beginner Books and had Esther work on reading those for a few weeks. She built a lot of confidence in reading and now we have jumped back into the lessons and she is doing really well. Esther's charter school did not provide this curriculum since it is a Christian curriculum. They did pay for the beginner books though since those do not have Christian Content.
Handwriting
Esther is pretty advanced in her handwriting so I don't worry about this one too much. We do the workbook her charter school provided and do it 2-3 times a week.
Math
For math we also use TGTB. I actually ordered the level K when Esther was four and started working on it with her then. She loved it and we did about thirty lessons before taking a break. This fall we picked it back up and she has been loving it again. We did try out another curriculum that her school provided, Mcgruffy Math. We like TGTB better so we mostly use that and occasionally do Mcgruffy if we are short on time.
 |
| The Good and the Beautiful Math |
I have always loved being outside, I grew up playing outside tons, and I want my kids to grow up that way too. However, it has been harder than I imagined getting them outside every single day, preferably for a few hours a day. Although ideally I would love to live in a mountain home with lots of land that my kids could safely explore, that is not our current reality and probably never will be. However, I am glad to live in a house with a backyard, in a safe neighborhood with parks close by, and mountains and hiking and many outdoor activities near by. I know there are so many benefits for children (and people of all ages) for spending time in nature, it can be hard to accomplish it, especially with two babies. But I still try. We try to make it to Free Forest School every week, and if we don't make that we almost always go to a park when Baby Boy has his visits. We also have a pass to our local nature center and that has been huge blessing. It is a place I can take the kids and feel safe to go "hiking" by ourselves. They also have a lot of weekly programs for kids that the girls like going to. Some days it is all I can do to take the kids on a walk to the park or to just let them play in the backyard for twenty minutes. Some days we don't get outside at all, especially if it is cold. On those days I just have to try and give myself grace and not feel too guilty about it. As the kids get older we will probably add in some type of formal nature study/nature journaling to our curriculum, but for now that feels too overwhelming so we are starting with the goal of just getting outside everyday.
A few of the books I'd recommend for learning about the benefits of outdoor play are
The Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv
Barefoot and Balanced by Angela J Hanscom
There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather by Linda Akeson McGurk
Reading
Reading has always been a love of mine and since they were babies, I have tried to instill that love into my children. We have many books in our home and the children's bookshelf sits front and center in our living room. Just like being outside, reading to children has so many documented benefits, academically, emotionally and relationaly between parent and child. We have always read picture books and bedtime and throughout the day and taken trips to the library every week. That aspect is already ingrained into our family culture so it has been easy to add in chapter book read-alouds during lunch as part of our school day. I had already started reading a few chapter books to Esther since she was about four. Now we are much more consistent though. So far, with Esther and Adele I have read Peter Pan (classic starts edition), The Little House in the Big Woods, The Courage of Sarah Noble, Charlotte's Web, The Little House on the Prairie, Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg, Kirsten's Birthday, and we are currently reading Kirsten Learns a Lesson. Usually I give them two choices for a chapter book and let them choose between them. If I am going to spend hours reading them a book I want to make sure it is a high quality book that I enjoy too. The Good and the Beautiful Curriculum puts a big effort on reading high quality literature. I appreciate that even though I think their standards are a little outrageous at times. Still I use their booklist to find good books that I know will be uplifting for me and the girls. I love reading books with a good Christian message and I feel like that is really hard to find in children's books nowadays. For the rest of this school year I am planning to read the girls Heidi, and Winnie the Pooh and I am sure we will read a few more than those too.
If you are looking for books to read about the benefits of reading aloud with your children, I'd recommend
Honey for a Child's Heart by Gladys Hunt
The Read Aloud Family by Sarah Mackenzie
Along with reading I have started trying to introduce poetry to the girls. Here are videos of them reciting their recent memorized poem.
As I stated earlier, I am still learning a lot about homeschooling. We are 8 weeks into our homeschool experience so I am by no means an expert. Most pressing right now is I am still trying to figure out how and what to do with Adele to help her not feel left out when I spend so much time working with Esther. I am thinking I am going to start a preschool curriculum with Adele so she can have her own special school time with Mom too. I don't want to do anything too academic, but just something fun that is also not too much work, if such a thing exists. If you have any preschool curriculum recommendations please send them my way. :)
I am grateful that I am able to homeschool my children right now. I know most people don't want to or understand the urge to want to homeschool, but it really is so enjoyable and fulfilling to me. I love teaching my children and I love being with my children each day.
Our homes are the ultimate setting for learning, living, and becoming. -Elder David A Bednar
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