Hi friends!
I can’t believe we will have a 5-YO in September. Mind-boggling, really. Since her birthday falls two weeks in the month, I was torn on starting K or giving her a TK year for a long time. But after a lot of thought and research, I do lean toward better late than early. The thing is, she wants to keep going and going and is advancing quite quickly. So I think we will start off slow and pick up the pace as needed. The beauty of homeschool is that grades can be a bit irrelevant at times because some kids advance in subjects while moving slower in others. I am 100% just going to go at her pace, but we are calling it a TK year since the compulsory school age in our state is 6. This also gives me an extra year to find our groove and rhythm without pressure.
At this age, really, the most important thing is play and natural, interest-led learning. You don’t even need curriculum. If all you have is a library card, paper, pencils, crayons, colored pencils, markers, scissors, and glue… you are good! But my kid is all LET’S DO SCHOOL every morning, so we are following her eagerness! I expect formal lessons to take less than 30 minutes a day, 45 minutes tops. That leaves the majority of the day to create, build, play, experiment, read, adventure, and explore.
I’ll eventually be sharing a detailed post on our homeschool style, but the short answer is: minimalist and relaxed.
Our Plan
We focus on the main subjects that are important at the moment: reading, handwriting, and math. I’ll include our curriculum for these below. We will have a minor focus on nature study because it is important to me that my girls appreciate and care for the Earth and incorporating this at a young age is easy since these are the kinds of topics they are naturally interested in – birds, weather, seasons, bugs, rocks, marine life, plants, etc. Plus it means being outside as much as possible.
“Teaching children about the natural world should be treated as one of the most important events in their lives.” -Thomas Berry
For the early years, I am not worried about formal history or science because these subjects are explored naturally throughout our days. For example, our nature study is a piece of science and we love science kits and shows. Easy. History/social studies/geography will come in the form of books, documentaries, etc. No detailed lessons or planning for me – really, just a topics list (I’ll share our nature study list soon) and a whole lot of library books! Simple!! Just the way we like it.
Having an uncluttered routine and fewer list of subjects means that we have plenty of margin for what is the most important at this stage: interest-led learning, play, and outside time!
Books make up a very large chunk of our homeschool day because I believe in a literature-rich education. Our morning basket features a number of books from our library. And again, science and history/social studies/geo will be incorporated into our days through this. I wrote a more in-depth post on how I find the best books for our homeschool. I encourage you to check it out if you’d like to see my favorite book list resources!
Our Curriculum Choices
(Amazon Affiliate links below)
So as far as curriculum goes, minimal. We will be using the following:
Language Arts/Phonics: Logic of English Foundations B, Explode the Code 1 & 2
Math: Kindergarten Math with Confidence
Handwriting: Scholastic’s Handwriting practice workbook and copywork (inexpensive and gets the job done!)
We have been loving Logic of English and will continue on. It is so robust! I am putting off the kindergarten math until possibly January… I’ll re-evaluate as we find our groove. We will be mostly working on number sense with board games and some living math books (if you’d like to see a post on these resources, let me know!) Handwriting is low key but we are going to hone in on proper letter formation, since she likes to start most letters at the bottom.
Choosing curriculum is a personal choice but the above are what feel right for us. The LA and math choices are open-and-go and cater to kinesthetic learners (very much my daughter). If you’d like me to go into detail on our experiences with them, I would be happy to review as we get going. Just let me know in the comments or on Instagram.
So there you go! I’m very excited a fresh year and I can’t wait to update and share with you along the way. x
