Kindergarten at Home: The First Month

Whew!  We survived our first month of homeschooling Kindergarten! Actually, "survived" is probably the wrong verb - "accomplished" provides a better fit for our experience. Some of the milestones reached during our school's germinal month include:

• Happiness (5yo) becoming comfortable with reading (as opposed to resistant like she was in the spring)
• Sweetness (4yo) loving her personalized alphabet adventures so much she asks for "more of my school, Mommy?"
• My children LOVING science (we're studying the Human Body)
• Daddy teaching the first art class about drawing details, which revolutionized my children's artwork

But less this listing of accomplishments make you think all was ease and comfort, let me list some of the challenges:

• Mr. Moose (1yo) deciding to give up his morning nap. Bad because that naptime was to have provided us an uninterrupted schooltime
• This revocation of naps has made school much more stressful for Mommy as she tries to fend off his grabbing (and eating) of books, papers and crafts; tries to balance holding him with phonics games and math books; and generally wears out from the whole experience
• Mommy struggling with the increased workload of school and not having a good attitude about it. 

Those challenges have yet to be fully addressed, but I'm going to be evaluating things and seeing how I can modify my schedule to cutdown on weekly preparation and to somehow work around Mr. Moose's afternoon nap (a puzzle still, because I usually work on my freelance writing projects then).

When I was trying to plan our kindergarten year, I searched high and low for blogs that would give ideas and inspiration. There wasn't much. Instead, there was an overload of preschool sites and a plethora of older elementary blogs. But in the Kindergarten realm, I felt alone. So in case you're wanting to read more about how others are homeschooling their kindergartners, here's what we're using:

• Firm Foundations: A Bible study based on the Catechism for Young Children (written by yours truly)
• Artistic Pursuits, book 1: An excellent art curriculum geared towards PreK - 1st Grade
• Little Otter's Science: A gentle, slow paced study of the human body. We're making a lapbook about the body as a go along. The girls enjoy looking at it and showing their Daddy any new additions to its content.
• Singapore Math, Kindergarten: Great and thorough
• Sing, Spell, Read & Write: I've heavily modified this curriculum to fit my daughters' needs and learning styles, but the backbone of the program is working well for us. I'll post more about my modifications some day in the future
• Various unit studies: Every fifth week, we're taking a break from the regularly scheduled programming to pursue some type of unit study that the girls are interested in. Our first unit study adventure will be this coming week, and we'll be learning about birds and going bird watching.

So that's it! If you want to see my lesson plans in more detail, just let me know. Looking forward to the next four weeks of school and our learning adventures.