Kingergarten Curriculum Choices and Review - Language Arts

Our first year of homeschooling was a surprise journey.  While some families set out to educate their children at home from the beginning, and others may pull their children from public or private schools after much deliberation, I felt quite taken by surprise as we began homeschooling last August.  Having decided the first week of August that learning at home would be the right fit for our just-turning-5-yr-old, I set out nervously for our local homeschool bookstore to buy "curriculum."  I didn't know what I was looking for, but I was so very glad that something called "curriculum" was sold.  At least I would know what to teach.

I have to say that in the interim 12 months I have become whole-heartedly convinced that a curriculm is not purchased, but that it rather consists of the set of objectives, lessons, and the associated path of learning that is established by the teacher.  While I was so eager to buy curricula to tell me how and what to teach my children, it has become very clear to me that I am the one with the authority, responsibility, and knowledge sufficient to determine how and what to teach my children.   However, I am so very grateful for the expertise of published materials that I may use (in whole or in part) in that process!  For further thoughts on the subject, enjoy this piece from the Schole Sisters Blog. 

But from here, I'll move on to Curriculum Choices that Worked for Us, 2013-2014 Kinder.    

Phonics /  Reading:
Teaching Jonathan to read was one of the steps that led me to fall in love with home education.  It was truly one of the best seasons of parenting so far.  In his preschool years we had fiddled with The Reading Lesson: Teach Your Child to Read in Twenty Easy Lessons.  After a break from the subject for a good while, we then went through the free resources at Starfall.com and it all clicked.  The next  summer as he turned 5, he was into the BOB Book readers.  After trying a workbook style language arts program for a total of 2 days, we discovered this simple book that fleshed out his grasp of phonics.  Classical Phonics was published around the turn of the twentieth century as a series of word lists for student practice, and I doubt many people use it alone.  But by this point it was all that Jonathan needed.  After BOB Books Jonathan read through the Little Bear (Level 1) series, then Frog and Toad (Level 2) and others by Arnold Lobel.  Both of these series were warm and absolutely delightful.  From there he read a few Mr. Putter and Tabby books and the Christian Liberty Nature Reader book K.  We found all of these to be a joy.

Once we had completed Classical Phonics around February, he had become a quite fluent reader.  I decided we would finish out our study of phonics as we approached it from the perspective of spelling, and we began All About Spelling, Level 1.  I think completion of this program will provide a very complete study of phonics.  We are now (in September) in chapter 20 (of 24) of Level 1, and he has reached a point where he is challenged.  I would expect that Level 2, which we'll begin in late fall after taking some time to work slowly through the next few chapters, will go more slowly than Level 1.   My draw to All About Spelling (AAS) initially was that it would provide a good study of phonics while separating his study of spelling and phonics from his handwriting skills.  This is in contrast to Spell to Write to Read  (SWR), which is another well respected phonics-based spelling program.  It does so my utilizing letter tiles for word building, instead of hand-written words.  However, by now the tiles are more tedious than writing, and we skip them for the majority of the work.  The program is still very open-and-go, which I much appreciate.  It is my understanding that SWR takes more work to implement, but I have not personally used it.



Handwriting / Copywork:
Since he'd begun Handwriting Without Tears in his preschool, we continued this with their next book, which I think was Letters and Numbers for Me.  The font is generally fine by me, though I have changed the way I have him write a few letters (their G drives me bananas).  But the book itself provides very little practice for each letter.  We finished the book before Christmas, and I made out pages of additional practice using their online free worksheet program to focus on letters that were giving him trouble.  The majority of the year we were focusing on using the correct stroke formation.  HWT actually has an iPad app that is helpful for teaching stroke formation, and I'm using it earlier with my second child to train early and maybe avoid the bad habits Jonathan got into while writing things on his own.  After the first half of the year, what worked best was for me to write out simple sentences from our reading (The Chronicles of Narnia were a favorite source) onto his HWT handwriting paper, skipping a line for him to copy.  At first I had him copy a page (3 lines) a day, but with time I became convinced by Miss Mason's admonition to have a young child complete only what he can do in excellence.  At this point I still have Jonathan copying only one line a day (usually about 4 or 5 words) of a poem, hymn, or scripture.  He is much more enthusiastic about copying something that he enjoys reading.  We also use copywork as a time to look at capitalization, punctuation, and a few parts of speech.



 Poetry:
As I mentioned in the prior post, we read a poem or two a day.  I initially read from an unillustrated anthology.  When my 3 yr old's attention waned, we were all distracted.  I discovered there was great value in obtaining a well illustrated volume.  So we restarted poetry in the spring, with this beautiful copy of A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson.  Our poetry was really a loved part of our Morning Time.  We also read Mother Goose for at least a month or two, to keep these classic cultural staples familiar.  This summer, we read through this version of A Child's First Book of Poems, and we discovered some real favorites.  Though we have moved on to a collection of poems by American authors for this term, Abby (nearly 4), still requests we read from A Child's First Book of Poems most days.

Literature:
We have enjoyed a number of good read-alouds without need for "teaching" moments or discussion.  Their enjoyment, exposure to good language and beautiful thoughts, and creative stories are value enough.  We read through The Magician's Nephew; The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe; and Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis.  We listened to Little House in the Big Woods and look forward to more from Laura Ingalls Wilder this year.  I wondered how Jonathan would take to it, but he was enthralled by the stories and details of their daily life.  We read Winnie the Pooh and plan to move on to The House at Pooh Corner later this year.  Steward Little, Trumpet of the Swan, My Father's Dragon, and Dr. Dolittle were also each a success.

For picture books, we drew heavily from the Five in a Row curriculum mentioned in my last post, utilizing volumes 1 and 2.  The vast majority of books we read were much loved.  Among our favorites were Make Way for Ducklings, A New Coat for Anna, Papa Piccolo, and How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World.