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It’s been almost one month since we’ve concluded my daughter’s kindergarten year. It feels sort of strange thinking about how she is moving into 1st grade already. The days of basic counting, and letter recognition are behind us. It was such a blessing to have a front row seat to her growth and learning over the year, and I have nothing but gratitude for our home education. You can get a more thorough look at our kindergarten rhythm and subjects in this blog post here!
My ultimate goal for our kindergarten year was to create an atmosphere for learning. I wanted to nurture rhythms throughout our day to make learning and play time intertwine. To me, kindergarten laid the groundwork to better prepare for the much grander feast that is to come in later grades.
In our kindergarten year, I also began planning our weekly lessons in a more formal planner (see the planner I use right here!). This was all trial and error, and it was definitely a learning experience for me, as the teacher to see the plans on paper come to life (or not). When it came to planning our weekly lessons, there wasn’t much to plan for our gentle kindergarten year. Just to give you a run down, if you haven’t been following me on Instagram or haven’t read my other kindergarten related blog posts, we had Bible and devotional reading, scripture memory and copy work, poetry recitation, and hymns for our morning time. You can read about our gentle kindergarten morning time right here! Then we moved into Math and lastly, language arts. Occasionally we would incorporate nature studies.
Math and language arts lessons from The Good And The Beautiful were already laid out for us to move along with, but our morning time plans, nature study activities, and any additional read alouds were selected on a whim by me. Some weeks were more collected than others. If I had to do it over again, I’d make these subjects more a priority to include, and for me, that means intentionally planning them out ahead of time for more visual motivation. These were the subjects my children enjoyed most and really made our homeschool feel whole.
Below I have included our Kindergarten recap with a few main components to take away from and hopefully encourage you in some way.
HELPFUL RHYTHMS + CONSIDERATIONS
+ Start ONLY when your child is showing readiness signs and interests in colors, letters, numbers on their own. Even at that point, don’t feel the need to jump into a curriculum right away. Start with some play-based learning a couple times a week. Counting apples for snack time, or sounding out letter sounds in words that your children hear daily (their name, mom, dad, book titles, ect.) is enough. My daughter was 2.5 years old when she showed readiness signs and my son is 2.5 currently and he isn’t showing many readiness signs which is totally ok. I personally will not be starting my son as early as I did with my daughter, but that doesn’t mean he is going to get a lesser education (a topic for another blog).
+ This is their only childhood and we need to preserve that through lots and lots of playtime, outdoor time, and reading books that fuel their creativity and imagination.
+ Focus on slow rhythms and cultivate a family culture that reads together, spends time in nature, and create habits that support the whole child (not just behavioral mishaps)
HELPFUL RESOURCES (not essential, just some things we used and loved)
+ Library Card
+ Kids Devotional
+ Exploring Nature With Children for nature studies
+ Handwriting Without Tears for practice option
+ The Good And The Beautiful Handwriting for practice option
+ Counting manipulatives (brears, unifix cubes, or nature elements from our backyard)
+ Crafting books for inspiration, craft supplies
+ Poetry books, tea pot and cups
+ Hand activities for during read aloud times
THINGS I’D DO DIFFERENTLY
+ I mentioned briefly above, but I would definitely work on being more intentional with our morning time subjects such as hymns, bible reading, scripture memorizing, poetry, art and crafts. Honestly, this would have been my main focus if I could do it over again. It is so easy to adapt math and phonics and writing practice into these subjects and I know my kindergartner would have enjoyed that more. We have learned so much through this year and I can’t wait to incorporate these things more intentionally in our years to come!
+ Introduce more chapter books during our read aloud and balance with picture books
+ Set stronger rhythms throughout the day to read more together
+ Carve more time in our week to be outside in nature walks
+ Rid myself of the pressure to follow all the prompts in a lesson from our curriculum earlier on.
Overall, our Kindergarten year was a hit! Altogether, our lesson time took an hour spaced throughout the day. We did this 4-5 days a week and that’s just how it worked for us. I don’t regret any parts of our homeschool year. However, I am taking the list of things I’d do differently (listed above) and allowing grace to step in and inspire me to try those things a little differently moving forward. No homeschool parent gets it correct 100% of the time, but I think it is important that we come to a humbling place and understand that we, ourselves are also learning alongside our children. Each year is just another beautiful opportunity to set the tone for our child’s learning atmosphere and experience.
