Kindergarten at the Academy

This week marks the fourth of the girls who have started more or less official lessons. Although anyone who has homeschooled a child from the beginning, having never placed them in intitutionalized school, knows that often a bit of a misnomer. As all parents are teachers to their children, and most spend some of the pre-school years teaching numbers, letters, colors, shapes, etc. as well as things like how to tie a shoe or Bible stories, the transition to "school" is a gradual, very natural kind of thing.

In actuality, Hailey, my almost 5 year old, has been having phonics instruction for months. So even though I consider her as official now, in reality it is just a continuation of what has been happening since birth. But I am doing things on a little more of an intentional basis, making sure we have time for certain things every day.

Today we started with Bible devotional that includes all the children. To start the year we are going through Our 24 Family Ways by the Clarksons. Then while the older three start in on things they can do independently, Hailey and I sat on the sofa and had a 10-15 minute phonics lesson. She has learned all the letters and their sounds, but our long break has caused her to forget a couple of them, and not be as quick to remember others, so we are spending this first week in review. I am using The Ordinary Parents' Guide to Teaching Reading, which has a wonderful poem to help remember all the consonant sounds. So we recited that, and then played a game with index cards. Each card has one consonant on it, and she had to give me the correct card that matched the sound I made. When she gets far enough along that she can read simple books - like Bob Books - I'll have her read to me out of one after the daily phonics lesson. But we aren't there yet. :-)

When we finished that, we moved on to math. We got out the big bucket of Duplo sized Legos and dumped them out. Then we counted all the legos. Then I would give her a pile of less than 20 legos, and she counted those. She still gets a little mixed up in the "teens" in counting, so I was having her count up to these numbers a few times.

I have never used a kinder math curriculum. Instead, I have several activities which I call "Kinder math," most of which were inspired by Ruth Beechick's An Easy Start in Arithmetic. I'll document some of these as the year progresses. However, one of the bedrocks of my girls' Kinder year is the use of all sorts of "manipulatives" - a fancy educational-ese term for concrete objects used to illustrate mathematical problems. I don't buy packaged sets, but we'll use legos, paper clips, books, marks on a paper, I think I even used M&M's once (but only with the oldest one!). We'll count them, sort them, add them, subtract them, group them, etc. This is probably the best preparation for further math that my girls have had.

Finally, we started going through the Kindergarten handwriting book I am using. I have taught all the girls to write using the Italic Handwriting series. This series teaches printing in a way that minimizes the number of times the student picks up her pencil to form a letter. Then when cursive is introduced, it does not look like traditional cursive, but rather like joined printing. It is so much easier to learn than traditional cursive, where you basically have to learn an entire new alphabet. But this week, she is just beginning the first book. When she is finished with it in several weeks, she'll move on to copywork: she'll copy short sentences I've written out on Kindergarten sized lined paper.

In total, this took less than 45 minutes today. When the older girls start history, she'll listen in on the books I read to Brynna, and do some of the fun projects with her - coloring pages, making things. But other than reading books to her, she is done for the day. This is the pattern that all the other girls have followed in Kindergarten, and it has worked as a great foundational year. By the end of the year, the girls were reading well, had a good grasp of some basic mathematical concepts, and could write all their letters. Hopefully, this year will work as well for Hailey. I'd hate to have to reinvent the wheel.