It is December and we are about halfway through the school year so I thought it might be nice to do a homeschool check in. It's been an interesting year and although my oldest is in kindergarten it is not the first year we have been homeschooling. I started lessons, limited and short, with him when he was 3. Some would say that he was always learning but, official "lessons" started when he was 3. He is almost 5 now and he is reading stories and is in the beginning stages of learning addition and subtraction. He LOVES learning. Which appeals so much to my nerdy heart as I too have always loved learning.
SO how has the year been going? Well, it's had its ups and downs. Overall? I would say that we are right on track. We do year round schooling here. I feel like this actually takes the pressure off of having to get lessons done every single day, or feeling guilty about getting the flu and taking a week or more off. It just suits my family's flow better.
Below is a list of the current curriculums in use for my Kindergartener.
** He is currently at a 1st grade reading level otherwise the other levels are for Kindergarten.
History/Geography
Language Arts
BookShark Language Arts 1 Package
Math
Science
Elemental Science Intro to Science
Breakdown:
I love Bookshark. I know it is expensive BUT it is all inclusive. I tried using a printable curriculum where you supplement books from your local library in order to do the lessons and it was SO MUCH WORK. Like I still do work preparing lessons now even with everything included. It was way too much. As well as the fact that many times I would struggle to find the books at any of the local libraries so there was a lot of ordering books, or asking the library to find the books to only then wait weeks for books to come in. So BookShark, with its completeness works for us.
As I eluded to above the curriculum is literature based. One of my main goals of homeschooling my kids is to get them to love reading and be great readers. To have read a vast amount and types of books by the time we are done. So far we are getting that with BookShark. There are Poems that we read daily, factual information constructed in an easy to digest manner for kids, and there are fun fantastical stories to help build their imaginations. We talk about everything we read to build reading comprehension, and with how much we read, he gets a lot of practice.
Recommendations: Get the hands-on-history add on. It comes with all the items needed for some crafting activities. For Literature, get the Explore the Code books add on. They are great! They also are matched with the lit lesson for the week. And if you don't have a handwriting curriculum, go ahead and get their Handwriting without tears books add on. We don't use this only because we have some handwriting books already.
A small negative (for me) would be that claims it is "secular" but really it is not. The company is an offshoot of Sonlight which is a non-secular curriculum very well known in most homeschooling communities. It is more neutral with notes letting the parent know when there are religious content so that the parent may choose to skip or not. I am doing secular teachings so I generally skip over anything religious when it comes up. I tolerate the small religious bits, mostly in old stories or books, as overall I find the curriculum to be a great one. It also helps that I am wanting a more conservative curriculum. I like that we read the Boxcar children which is over 50 years old. So far, it works for my family although, as with most curriculums and homeschooling routines, they might not work for you.
This brings me to why I don't use BookShark for everything. Their "complete" curriculum worries me that it won't have the science in it's entirety that I would like. And the Math, while they do include Singapore Math as an option, it is not the version of Singapore that I felt suited my family. There are several lines of curriculum made by Singpore Math, with the Dimension Math being the one that I felt more fit our family. They have a program comparison on their site to help you determine which is best for you and your family.
We love Singapore Math. My son LOVES it. Math is his favorite subject. His Math lessons are motivators to get the rest of his lessons done. I couldn't love this program more. It start off small and constantly builds on the concepts slowly introducing the new concepts in very broken down ways so that a young child begins learning the concepts of addition long before you ever actually reach addition. We had the preschool curriculum and in that it started introducing the concepts of addition and subtraction. We are over halfway through Kindergarten Math and it has been building the concepts this whole time while introducing numbers up to 20 along with the written versions of them. It is such a great curriculum.
What I would recommend, though, would be to download the list of required manipulatives and source them elsewhere. The prices on Singapore Math are higher than elsewhere. Along with the fact that they send the order out as one package. You might think, oh!, that's a good thing. But, what if you order something that is in stock, but somehow, at their warehouse it actually isn't. Well as they are sourcing the other items to go to your order which can take days, they realize that that item/s are no longer in stock. Maybe because it took so long to fulfill your order, maybe because their system didn't update fast enough. Who knows! Well, now you would think that they will send out what they have. Nope. They will then take another several days working to get you to cancel the original order, put in a new order minus the out of stock item, then fulfill the new order, again take many days to do so. I feel like there might be a better way to do this. Just maybe. Can you tell there is a bad taste left?
Anyways, bottom line - you will find cheaper items numerous places and probably be able to get better customer service than I did. Overall, I recommend the curriculum. One other negative, is I wish that the Pre-K and Kindergarten curriculums had home versions. But that is a small negative as it is quite easy to work through the teacher version all the same.
Lastly, I wanted to start into Science this year but that has proven to be very difficult. With all that we have going on science and its experiments have been challenging to include in the day. But we have a science curriculum and it is very simple and give the options for daily lessons or 2 days a week. So far it has been great, when we can manage it, as the lessons are fun and the experiments are super interesting. I don't really have a lot of pros and cons to this as of yet as we really haven't been able to give it much use yet.
Next year we hope to start a foreign language and get better at the science. I hope to find a literature based foreign language curriculum but I am not sure how successful I will be. If you haven't noticed, I shy away from online curriculums or games. In a world where they will inevitably be sucked into the world of tech, I want to keep that at bay as much as possible. This coming from a Software Engineer. Yep, that's right. I know how bad it can be sitting on a computer all day so I don't want to have my kids be like that for as long as I can. They will learn the logics of computing other ways. My husband and I will make sure of that.
As for music we do violin lessons and for exercise we workout, go to playgrounds, have play dates, play outside, go ice skating, and play hockey. So, they get ample amounts of movement time.
Overall, I am happy with the choices in curriculum I made this year. I started my then 2 yr old on alphabet sounds, tracing, learning how to cut, painting, and recognizing the number 1-10. He is now 3 and currently knows most of the alphabet sounds and all the numbers 0-10. Mostly he gets a short lesson, just a couple minutes, flipping through the alphabet flash cards. Otherwise we play games and have craft activities. I started the 1 year old on the flashcards just the other day (mostly because he was there when I did them with the 3 yr old and seemed interested).
I look forward to the coming months and seeing how much my kids learn and grow as little humans. I love that they enjoy learning as much as I do and seeing their individual interests beginning to grow.
