Homeschool Curriculum Review - Kindergarten

We made it! We finished our homeschool year! There were some good days and some bad days, but we did it, and I think everyone is happy for summer to be here. I learned a lot in the process as well. But I wanted to share with you what I thought of the different curriculums that I used for each kid. (I am doing this because I looked for a lot of these kind of things and had a hard time finding them). You can find my plan for what I was going to do here.

KINDERGARTEN REVIEW

Math: We used  Saxon math and loved it! It was not hard at all for my boy, he even had days where he did more then the one page. By doing this we went onto the first grade book, by the time we got to that we did have to slow things down a bit because it was getting a little bit harder for him. Now I love math, I am just weird that way, so I did not follow the lesson plans that they have. I know what works for my boy so I just reviewed the concept and taught it to him in a way that I knew he would understand. I also had him do counting and flashcards every couple of days.

Reading: We used Sing, Spell, Read and Write. I like this program and had used it before with one of my other children. However, my boy did not catch on as quick as my other child. so I had to slow things down and really review concepts. My boy enjoyed the program the only thing that we both did not really like was that their books are really long - and if you have a beginning reader those long books get really long with them figuring out words. This makes for frustration and they lose interest quickly - not a good combo for a beginning reader. but we supplemented with books from the tiny library here and well we even made a few of our own! We also did sight words, and I made him practice everyday.

Now we did not finish this program, we only made it to the blends like au, ew, and ou. These were really giving him some grief and so we just went to reading books everyday and practicing our sight words. We are making progress and he is remembering a little bit about those blends now that he sees them in everyday reading. Oh, and we only used the singing part of this once - I used it everyday with my other kid, but this boy is not one for sitting and singing songs. We also watched lots of Leap Frog videos on Netflix, and those helped to reinforce a few concepts.

Writing: He drew pictures and wrote one word about them, and that was like pulling teeth. He would rather just sit and draw. so we might be a little behind next year with writing, but we will see. I did make him start writing his sight words towards the end of the year, and it was just as hard but I persisted and he started doing it with out me telling him.

History: He sat through a few stories from Story of the World, but would rather play, and I let him.

Science: We used pages from a simple book I found at Barnes and Noble. It was fun and he liked it because it involved a lot of coloring. I found that the bring science home experiments were a little bit more preparation then I bargained for and so we stopped those after about a month. I am all for simpler! My kids say I slacked on science this year, so we are going to do a few fun experiments from pinterest this summer.

All in all it was a good year, He was able to grasp reading and math which I think is the most important part of Kindergarten, we could use some work on our social skills, but hopefully that will come!

Stay tuned and hopefully tomorrow I will review what we I thought of second grade!