Kindergarten was really no different than what we had been doing his whole life as far as Tot School and preschool stuff but as a more ‘official’ year than the others it was much more than I could have hoped for! I will elaborate more in another post but it was super relaxed and go with the flow. We read a lot, played a ton of games, did LOTS of coloring and just basically did whatever we wanted. 🙂 Not to mention we got to stay up late and sleep in. Well on the days I didn’t have to work that is. My goal was for him to love learning and he does! He learned to read, learned basic math, can count to 100+, can skip count by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s, we went on field trips to museums and zoos and had plenty of play dates.
1st Grade
We will be starting First Grade in a couple of weeks and I’m super excited! We didn’t use a curriculum for Kindergarten because I just wasn’t feeling it. Since Baby Z will be here in September I was really wanting something that was a bit more structured and already laid out for me so I could be creative when I could and slack when I needed to. After HOURS of researching we decided on the Sonlight curriculum. I think it’s going to fit us well and if not at least we were able to start somewhere!
So I will share with you what exactly we picked!
Core A (4 days/wk) History/ Bible/ Language Arts/ Reading
As you can tell it’s heavily literature based but since we love books around here that was part of our love for this curriculum. You can pick the level for reading and we went with 2nd grade readers. I really wanted to keep him in 1st grade readers but the samples looked way too easy and I’m afraid he would get bored. It was mostly Dr. Seuss and the questions were like ‘what rhymes with cat? what article of clothing was in the story?’ He is actually reading over my shoulder as I type this and giggling so yeah he is ready for more than just sight word reading. 🙂
We also went with Core A Science. I did 5 days a week on this one just because it added a few extra books that I think he would enjoy. We don’t have to use them as a 5th day, it can just be extra somewhere.
For Math we are going with Horizons 1. Jared was a little on the fence about this but after looking at the sample work I think it will fit him well. We’ll see. We looked into Math-U-See as well but for now we are going to see how we like this.
We almost went with Handwriting without Tears but Jared really liked this one better.
We did get the desk strips even thought it’s not the same font he will be learning. Every where you go things are in different fonts so I’m not too concerned. He likes to be able to look at his letters when he is trying to write something though.
I’ve been interested in the All About Reading/ All About Spelling for a couple years now and decided to take the plunge! It recommended that you complete All About Reading 1 before going on to spelling but he is really into writing and spelling words himself and asking me why it’s C vs K or why certain letters are silent. So we went with All About Spelling 1. If he is having trouble with it or I think we need to go back to AAR then we can always do that at any time.
I have a few more books on our amazon wish list that I’m interested in getting but I think this will be PLENTY for now! 🙂
We still plan to take the same relaxed approach. If he is not interested in something we will move on. I’m not going to make him do school if he is not feeling it that day. Luckily it’s a lot of reading so we can just read and keep it natural. Most of his best learning time is done in the afternoon or at night. He’s really not a morning person for learning. He would rather play legos or play outside which I’m totally okay with.
We are going to start mid July so we can get somewhat of a routine before baby Z comes. We like the year round approach anyway.
He will also be in Awana, BSF, choir and gymnastics!
