Contemplating Kindergarten

For the past few weeks my thoughts have been geared toward G-man's upcoming kindergarten year. We'll officially start in the fall, although I have been realizing that we've been doing kindergarten stuff for quite some time now. For future reference, I'm just going to list some of the goals I have and things I plan to do or use for our kindergarten year.

G-man has really been thriving on the unit studies of Five in a Row and http://www.homeschoolshare.com/ . The curriculum provides a great jumping off point for many subjects including social studies, geography, art, and some math. So I plan to continue with this into his kindergarten year. We'll also do some of our own unit studies. I plan to do units on frogs, each of the continents, and a quarterly musical composer unit. I'll also leave some flexibility in our schedule so that we can follow G-man's personal interests and make unit studies around those. Space is one subject I know we'll be learning about as he is very interested in all things space right now.

I plan to work weekly Bible verses into our units so that G-man can begin hiding the word of God in his heart. We'll also do daily children's devotionals and perhaps a Bible story of the week which I would work similarly to the Five in a Row curriculum. The repetition would help familiarize him with the stories.

For phonics, I will be using Bob Books and various other books and games including http://www.starfall.com/ and the phonics games on http://www.pbskids.org/ .

For math, I plan to use some of the Funtastic Frogs curriculum and maybe a bit of Math-U-See along with just everyday counting and number recognition games. My goals are to teach him to count to 100, count by 10s to 100, count by 5s to 100 and count by 2s to 20. I also want him to be able to tell time to the hour, recognize coins and understand their values, and be able to read a calendar.

We will continue to learn Spanish vocabulary through Boca Beth (possibly ordering another video from them) and My First 100 Words in Spanish.

For an introduction to history, I'm thinking of using History For Little Pilgrims.

For science, I'm planning to use the Let's Read and Find Out Science series. I also have a great book with tons of fun experiments in it called More Mudpies to Magnets: Science for Young Children.

We'll also be involved with the local homeschool group for social activities and field trips, we'll continue to enjoy storytime at the library, and we'll have regular playdates with Seth. I'm also thinking he'll be ready to start martial arts in the fall.