As we get ready to wrap up the current school year. I wanted to share with you the homeschool curriculum choices we made this year. This is how I’ve prepared our 4 year old daughter for her upcoming kindergarten year! Being a first generation homeschool parent who wasn’t around homeschool families. I truly felt the weight to find curriculum for daughter. I didn’t know where to start and it all felt so overwhelming…
If you’ve started to look into homeschooling your child you might feel the same type of overwhelm. I mean after all putting your child’s education in your hands is a HUGE responsibility. Then to add to the confusion their are so many curriculum choices and teaching styles out there. It’s a lot for a first generation homeschool mama to handle. If you aren’t sure where to start your little one off, I totally understand! Hopefully I’m here to make your life a bit easier by sharing my experience!
I also wanted to mention I know lots of people don’t formally school their children until ages 5 or 6. For us however, my daughter loves the aspect of school and learning. My goal is to have a confident kid who loves learning. You’ll see in this post that I have implemented some Kindergarten level curriculum choices. I only did this as a way to introduce certain topics. I put no pressure on her to do these Level K resources.
Now, with that being said you’ll have to adjust this based of your families and child’s needs. This is just what’s working for us personally.
If you still have a very young child you’d like to introduce the basics of learning to. Or if feel your child is not quite ready for a kindergarten prep curriculum, check out my blog post here. In this blog post I share everything we use in the beginning of our homeschool journey. These things helped build the foundation for where we are at now. I honestly recommend introducing these resources to your child as early as possible and wish I started sooner!
When it comes to your homeschool education I recommend deciding each year what you hope for your child to learn. This way you have a plan to follow and can pick curriculum accordingly. To do this I watched tons of videos and read tons of blog posts. This helped me determine what is was I wanted her to know before entering kindergarten and wrote it all down. This is the list I came up with for all her core learning needs.
Here I’m going to breakdown the homeschool choices I made in each of those categories. I’m also going to give reasonings why, alternatives and links.
For Language Arts we decided to go with The Good and The Beautiful. The reason I went with them for Language Arts is because first off the curriculum is absolutely gorgeous. Second, the curriculum is open and go making it super easy for me as a first generation homeschool parent. Third, when it come to Language Arts I love that its not just a worksheet type curriculum. It comes with quick stories to help engage the child. They have two sets of the curriculum.
This Preschool Language Arts Course Set set is a great way to introduce necessary material to little ones. It gives them a foundation to start reading and writing and couldn’t be happier with it. It also comes with a folder full of games and activities as well as practice sheets. You could start this as early as 3 years old. Perfect for young learners
This Kindergarten Prep Language Arts Course Set includes some repetition from the previous Preschool course set. Along with more building blocks to prepare them for kindergarten. Such as vowel recognition, rhyming, reading two letter words and more.
When choosing a handwriting curriculum I decided to go with The Good and The Beautiful again. I love the notebook style and how they continue on throughout the years. When it comes to little ones they have a few choices.
For kids just learning to write and doodle they have these options.
In my blog posted I linked to earlier, I mentioned we had been using this erasable handwriting book. I HIGHLY recommend it. My daughter had so much success using this that I felt she could skip the Pre-Writing For Littles. However, I still think they’re a great resource!
I highly recommend the Kindergarten Write and Reuse. Its a great addition to your homeschool collection for kids of all ages! This is because it has the letters just like the penguin one however, it also includes numbers.
Since I felt she would be able to we went straight ahead this year with:
The Good and The Beautiful: Level K Handwriting Book
When it comes to learning to read I’ll have to be honest I didn’t realize how hard it would be. At least for us… With that being said I’m going to share what we’ve tried and what others have suggested
Just because this system didn’t work for us doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for others… IT DOES! I just don’t think it’s how my daughter learns and quite frankly its not how I learn either.
Elemental Phonics is what we’ve started out with. Its great as far as simplicity and getting the message across without distraction and I know lots love it. It’s a super affordable option and a great place to start! It breaks it down into multiple books that build upon each other. I’ve given it a shot and thinking we need to switch it up. This doesn’t at all mean its a bad program at all! Some things work well for some kids that don’t for others.
Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons reminds me a bit of Elemental Phonics. Just a tad more advanced. I think if your child is doing well with that this could be a great addition or substitute!
I’ve heard amazing things about the All About Reading Program! I highly recommend looking into it to see if it would be a good fit for your family!
As of now, I feel that my daughter is very visual when it comes to learning. I actually learned to read using Hooked On Phonics and vividly remember it. The thing I like about it is that it’s majorly evolved but they still sell some of the evolution.
It’s no surprised that in this digital age we have online learning for reading. I actually don’t have a an iPad so don’t think I’ll be using their most recent development. However, if I did I would be using it. I don’t think you need an iPad but I don’t really want my daughter using my phone. This method seems very effective from what I’ve seen! They claim to guarantee your child will read in 30 days!
This is the option I think we will be going with. This seems to be a mix of the old school books with a bit of the visual learning. Another thing I like is that I can continue to use these sets for future children. The sell the kits broken down by age/level and the whole set.
A math curriculum in preschool isn’t necessary. However, there are things that you can teach your preschooler to make learning math possible!
Getting a basic preschool math workbook is perfect for little ones because it gets them familiar with numbers and the basic concepts for math.
Flash cards are the easiest and most essential way to get your kids to start recognizing numbers. These are the ones we have and I love them because they have number recognition, word recognition as well as counting objects to match the number on the other side!
I’m going to mention this Write and Reuse Kindergarten Workbook again because again its wonderful to let them just use this book whenever and they can use it over and over again!
We started with a lot of number recognition, tracing and counting last year and this year in Pre-K I did decide to go ahead and get her The Good and the Beautiful: Level K Math. I purchased this thinking we would just try a lesson or 2 a week but what I ended up discovering is she LOVES math and wants to do it each day! She loves the manipulatives that comes with The Good and the Beautiful curriculum
Well there you have it! All the resources we’ve used this year thus far to get my daughter ready for kindergarten! I really have seen so much progress since introducing these curriculums and cannot wait to share with you the choices I have planned out for next year as she enters kindergarten!
[…] I am so excited that today I get to share with you the homeschool curriculum choices I made for my daughters Kindergarten year! Homeschool is one of my favorite things I get to do with my daughter and helping her cultivate a love for learning is so special to me. If you haven’t already checked out my blog post on our preschool curriculum choices I’ll link that here. […]