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what to do for kindergarten?
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We are new to Charlotte Mason, but not homeschooling. We will be starting our 3rd year of homeschooling in the fall and I am prepping for our new year. I will have a 5th grader, 3rd grader, Kindergartener, and a 3.5 year old that joined our family via the miracle of adoption.
I am working on module one, but what does everyone do for kindergarten? All I see listed is 1st grade and up. Thanks!
Delightful Reading and Writing are good places to start if your child has the letter recognition and sounds down. RightStart Math or Math U See, Outdoor Secrets and Companion for science and nature study, picture books about American history. He can listen in to everything else with the family if desired.
Mine participate in Picture Study, Composer Study, Hymn Study, Poetry, and Bible and Scripture Memory. I try to have things like coloring pages, mazes, cutting skills, etc available in her notebook so my 4 yo can join in and “do school like the big girls” (her words). She chooses to do so quite a bit. =)
She has her own Nature Study notebook and does that with us. She draws and colors even if she isn’t really good yet. Sometimes I do a quick sketch for her and she colors it while the rest of us add to our own journals.
When ds8 was in kindergarten, I focused on Bible stories, reading (turns out he had taught himself, so we mainly worked on word families and sight words), penmanship, and math skills, mainly one to one correlation to 100, patterns, even/odd numbers, and some simple addition. We also read lots of books from a list of my all time favorites. Some were general picture books, some a little “science-y,” but I didn’t say “Ok, we’re having science now.” If a picture book had a specific geographic location, I showed him on the map. We read nursery rhymes and some other poems.
Dd will be in K this coming year. I intend to do pretty much the same thing with her, except I will be alternating ds’s science with seasonal theme books 2x/wk and will be doing seasonal poetry since I’ve already done nursery rhymes. I will have to teach her to read, though. I’m not sure how much she has taught herself, but then ds was 5.5 when we started (Feb bday), and dd will be barely 5 (July bday). I will be encouraging her to sit in on ds’s Bible as well as listening to her Bible story (I read an OT and a NT passage directly from the NKJV) and Composer Study, Scripture Memory, science, and geography, but I don’t know how much she will want to. I do Character Study as a family subject already.
Our kindergarten consisted of:
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, then Dick and Jane books and Little Bear books, for reading instruction and practice.
Math-U-See’s Primer
Scripture and poetry memorization (we really enjoyed Robert Louis Stevenson)
Literature aloud from The Classic Pooh, Trumpet of the Swan, Stuart Little, and other books suggested on SCM
106 Days of Creation Studies, plus nature study, for science. We also had a membership to a local science museum and made many trips to the zoo.
Me on the Map for geography
listening to CDs of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, etc. in the car
Reading each day from Vos’s Child’s Story Bible
We did not begin using a formal history curriculum until our second year.
We did school each day for 1-1.5 hrs. Kids played inside and outside a lot (still do). And dh and I made ourselves available for the 1,478 questions asked every day about various topics.
That’s what Kindergarten looked like in our house.My younger son was K this year. I basically bumped him up to 1st, just because it was easier to work together as a family that way. It was nothing too rigorous or time-consuming.
In the morning we did Scripture memory, various read-alouds (history, nature, religion), and Artist/Composer/Poetry studies as a family.
After that, he had a few subjects to work on:
-reading (finishing 100 Easy Lessons and moving on to easy readers)
-math
-science
-handwriting
We were always done with everything in 60-90 minutes. Afterwards, he spent lots of time playing outside, learning the 50 states (because he wanted to keep up with his brother), and playing with his sisters. At night daddy reads all of them whatever we are reading for literature.
I would just include him with the big kids for most subjects that he is able to sit in on. You can even have him join in for the 1-3 grade History readings since it’s only a year past where he is. The only things you would really need to do separately would be math, reading, and handwriting.
We really like My Father’s World Kindergarten. It is fun, educational, and flexible, made for families with multiple children. Even your 3.5 year old would enjoy the activities!
Our youngest is going into K and I plan to do as I’ve been doing…just include her in with the family subjects, but now she can do her own math, writing and reading using Math U See Primer and Teach Your Child to Read in 100 EZ Lessons. We’ll start working on writing letters on blank paper. We got her name down this year. She wants to do what her big sisters do, so why not?
I just take things down to her level (draw a picture instead of copywork). Tara
We are finishing up kindergarten with our son and daughter, both 6, 4 months apart in age but developmentally farther apart.
They listened in to our family reading time, which included Bible reading, history/geography, and sometimes music or an audio book here and there.
While we didn’t do science together per se, we did take nature walks together, we go camping a lot and “study” nature of some sort every time we camp (and most often when outside while studying a red-headed skink two of my sons caught in a jar for observation). My 2 kindies LOVE IT when their older brothers have animals they can observe.
The skink was let go!
I did something with our kindies that went really well. I had a spiral notebook for each of them that they used for math journaling. Each week I would teach them a concept (even/odd; counting by 2s; 1-20; ZERO; etc.). I tried to do this on Mondays (and most often we did). On Monday, I would teach it in a hands-on way, then later in the week I would write on the board copywork for them to put in their Math Journal that related to the concept. It really helped reinforce and they loved having a notebook like older brothers.
They also did handwriting with this book, which I made from a Currclick purchase: http://www.currclick.com/product_info.php?products_id=21135&it=1
They loved this book so much I am ordering another one for 1st grade. I make it myself from the PDF and have it spiral bound. It has coloring pages that teach about the animals on every other page.
For science read-a-loud with just them, we read from CLP Nature Reader K, which they thoroughly enjoyed. Next year, they will just sit in on our Apologia Astronomy reading/experiements.
I recently began calendar time with them, which has been wonderful. I made my own calendar teaching tool using cards that fit in 9-pocket page protectors. They love it! And I love they have learned the days, weeks, months, etc. They wanted to know every day “what day is it?” “how do you know?” so I knew they were ready.
Everything else was just icing: working in workshop with Daddy, cooking with Mommy, art, music class at church, ballet for DD, taekwondo for DS, etc.
That’s what Kindergarten looked like in our house.
I just take things down to her level (draw a picture instead of copywork). 
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