On Monday, we're planning on starting our homeschool year. I'm up late tonight planning our first week or two. This is new to everybody, so it'll be a fun (and interesting) experience for us all.
As for a schedule, we'll be rotating between mornings and afternoons depending on my husband's days off. This way I can give Guggy (kindergarten) the attention he needs. We're also going to do preschool at home for Sissy, who turns 3 in a little over a week. Mr A, who turns 2 in September, will be given some educational toys and some fun toddler and coloring activities to do. He doesn't quite have the attention span for us to do anything formal with him yet, so we'll just go with the flow for him.
Here is the curriculum we plan to use.
Guggy (kindergarten - age 5)
My Big Kindergarten Workbook
I actually bought this workbook from Wal-Mart. It has separate sections for beginning math skills, reading readiness, recognizing colors, shapes, and more. Basically, this will be our beginning of the year review of the skills he learned while in preschool.
Horizons K Math
We're starting with book 1. This book starts with counting and writing numbers and ends with basic addition. I'm really excited to see how we progress in his math skills as the year goes on.
Five in a Row
We're probably not going to start this right away. The concept of FIAR is reading the chosen book five days in a row. The lesson plans can be done in as little as 30 minutes. There are different exercises to do each day.
Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons
We've already dove into this one a lot. I'm going to be doing this with Guggy and Sissy both. I'm not sure if they'll be able to do it together as we've had some bickering, so we'll have separate learning times as far as this goes.
Sissy (turns 3 mid month - preschool)
My Big Alphabet Workbook
This book could work well with both preschool and kindergarten. It features letter recognition, letter-sound association, writing, ABC order, etc. The beginning parts of this book will be review for Sissy as she already has letter recognition down. She's already showing signs of reading readiness.
Fisher Price Kindergarten Workbooks 1 and 2
We're starting her with a lot of kindergarten skill as well. If you know our daughter in person, you know she's on par with her 5 year old brother with a lot of her skills. She can even count to 10 in Spanish. These are little $1 workbooks, but for preschool it's perfect as I can mix up what she's doing and see exactly where she's at.
Unit studies
Here's what we have planned so far for unit studies. During unit studies, we'll tie in our learning of the alphabet, numbers, writing, and reading. We'll also be studying about fall and winter weather when the time comes. I plan to also incorporate crafts, activities, and field trips to make these units hands on.
August- Horse unit
September- Frogs and toads
October- Harvest time/fall season
November- History of Thanksgiving
December- Holidays around the world
Websites and blogs
Enchantedlearning.com
For $20 a year, you can get a ton of printable worksheets for all ages. This is a great website to use to supplement your curriculum.
Kidslearningstation.com
I actually just found this one and I'm super excited about the free printable worksheets. We're going to be using this website quite a bit.
So that's it for the first part of our year. Wish us luck as we start this journey!
