It’s halfway through the school year and it’s a time of reflection for most homeschoolers. We are asking ourselves what is working? What do we need to change? And planning ahead into the next year even. So how is homeschooling going? Today I’m going to give you a little kindergarten homeschool mid-year update.
Kindergarten Homeschool Mid-Year Update
In the first kindergarten post I shared some of the curriculum that I was planning on using as relaxed homeschoolers. I hope it’s no shock that things didn’t go exactly as planned. (This post contains affiliate links.)
Reading Curriculum
Before we even began, I decided what I was doing to teach my son the alphabet wasn’t working. So I bought a widely known and highly recommended curriculum to help us out. We used All About Reading, Pre-Reading level which teaches uppercase letters, lowercase letters and letter sounds. The curriculum gave us great ideas and activities for learning letter recognition and reading skills in a fun and memorable way! That combined with my revelation of what works for Caden, he was able to learn all the letters, upper and lower case, as well as the sounds in about two months. We didn’t even get halfway through the curriculum before I decided he already knew the material. So we continued to use this method to review the letters and sounds while I figured out what was next.
For the second half of the year, I am planning to start teaching Caden to read. I believe he is ready. We are going to try using The Reading Lesson: Teach Your Child to Read in 20 Easy Lessons. What I like about this curriculum is that it is very affordable, visual and short lessons. It’s important for Caden to have short lessons that work with his developing attention span and the visual clues will help him remember what he is learning. If this curriculum turns out to be a poor fit we will go back to using All About Reading, Level 1.
Handwriting Curriculum
We started the year using Handwriting without Tears. It was going great until we got to lowercase letters. Caden really started to struggle with perfectionism and had a hard time forming the letters. So we took a break from using HWOT and will continue handwriting instruction with this Star Wars workbook. This workbook really appeals to his interests and the handwriting practice is set up as tracing which puts his perfectionist mind at ease. Plus he loves the mazes included every few pages!
Math Curriculum
For math we will continue to use Saxon Math K. We love that the lessons are short and hands-on. Caden loves the little manipulatives he gets to play with! We are a little behind because we took some time off when Caden started resisting schoolwork, but we are ready to get back to work! One change I did make is to use a white board calendar (like this one) rather than the calendar workbook. It is just more fun to use a white board and since it is up on the wall we can look at it any time of the week! I should also add we will probably skip many of the lessons because he has already learned it, like the lessons on shape recognition.
Science Curriculum
For science we are still loving our Spangler Science Kits! About once a week we start our school day with a few science experiments from our latest kit! They are so much fun and Caden really looks forward to getting them in the mail each month!
We’ve also added nature study to our weekly activities. We started using Exploring Nature with Children as a guide and to help us focus our weekly nature studying. This guide is great and includes information about nature topics, poems, activity ideas and a book list!
We are so excited to get back to the school routine after the holiday break! And I’m hoping these changes make school time more enjoyable to both of us! Have you made any mid-year changes in your homeschool? Tell me about it in the comments! And stay tuned for more posts about homeschooling!
© 2016 – 2017, Stir The Wonder. All rights reserved.
Leave a Reply