Today was our first official day of homeschooling Kindergarten! Our 5-year-old was actually pretty excited to get started. For this school year, we are using many homeschool curriculum resources from the enrichment program we are a part of. Once a week our kindergartener will go to her enrichment class with other kids her age. The other four days she will be home learning with me (and her little sister).
This program helps provide homeschool curriculum to families. They have a range of options for the different subject areas that we can choose to use for the year, or we can purchase our own materials if we would like to use something they do not offer. Many of the books and materials are borrowed for the school year (like a long-term library book loan), but the student workbooks are ours to keep.
Here is a look at what we are planning on using for the year.
History and Geography
The bulk of our curriculum choices comes from BookShark. We are using their Level K All-Subject Package which includes the Intro to the World: Cultures for the History/Geography portion. Ther are many books that we will be reading throughout the year, plus adding details to the Timeline Book, calendar, and maps.
Language Arts
The BookShark Language Arts set for the kindergarten level schedules the Handwriting Without Tears Letters and Numbers for Me, Explode the Code books, Fun Tales books, and other activities for learning letter sounds and formations. As part of the enrichment program, we were also able to add Spelling You See A: Listen and Write and Wordly Wise to the mix. It looks like a lot, but all of these materials are not going to be used every day (some of them won’t even be used until farther along in the year).
Science
We put in our curriculum order back in April and had selected to use BookShark Science Biology, Botany, and Physics. And then in May, we won the Exploring Creation with Astronomy book set from Apologia. Since getting the astronomy books, our daughter has been really into space. She wants to be an astronaut now and wants to watch movies about space on Netflix a lot. I haven’t totally figured out how we are going to do the science stuff yet, but I definitely want to use the astronomy books to feed her excitement of space. Time will tell how much of each we use during the course of the year.
Mathematics
For teaching math, we are going to be using Math U See Primer. I love that it comes with manipulatives to use with the lessons to build and visualize the concepts being taught. Our daughter is always moving, so having something to do with her hands will probably help her focus more during math time. She already does well with counting and recognizing numbers, so we may breeze through the first few lessons which would give us more time to spend on later lessons if needed.
Bible
For our Bible readings, we will be going through the Egermeier’s Bible Storybook. Each day we will read one or two sections and talk about what the story teaches us. This is not part of any of the above curriculum, but teaching our kids about God is important to us as a family. In addition to the Bible readings, we will have a Bible verse to focus on for each week.
This is the bulk of what we will be using this year (and most of it fits nicely in this basket I got a while ago!). The only things not mentioned in this post (but will probably show up in a future post) are supplemental books and resources for things like art and music, and for learning more about a particular topic that stands out to our daughter.
Are you homeschooling this year? What homeschool curriculum are you using or have enjoyed? I’d love to hear from you since we are just beginning this homeschool adventure.
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