Homeschool Kindergarten Plan

In this post, I share all of my homeschool kindergarten plan for my daughter’s kindergarten year!

{Note for Readers: After you check out this post, go visit this one for a comparison of my plans and what actually ended up working for this school year! —> Homeschool Kindergarten Plan: Expectaion vs. Reality}

This September, my baby girl ( or big little girl, as she prefers, ha!) is officially starting homeschool! She just turned 5 a couple weeks ago.

I taught Pre-4 for 8 years and one of the things that I always told my parents that questioned if their child was ready to go to kindergarten because of development or a late birthday, was that it is always a good idea to give them an extra year. Give them the gift of time. Every parent that I knew that had waited a year, felt very strongly that it had been the right decision. I never knew one that regretted it, although I did know families that went ahead and sent their child to school and wished they hadn’t.

Of course homeschool kindergarten and public school are very different things. At home, we can learn our own way, at our own pace. If she was going to public, I would absolutely, no question wait another year. But with all that said, we are starting this year with gentle kindergarten. I’m kind of referring to it in my own mind as “jr. kindergarten” and we will just see as we go what she’s ready for and not ready for. I don’t have any desire to push her to learn certain things at the expense of leaving a bad taste in her mouth this early. So the name of the game will be learn through play! I am keeping this in mind as I make my homeschool kindergarten plan.

Wilhelm von Humboldt defined, as the goal of education, beauty of character. He was fighting against the idea that people only learn to have a job…Because once the character is developed, these practical skills are very easy to learn.

19th century Prussian educator, Wilhelm von Humboldt

If you want to read a summarized version of the Charlotte Mason theory for early childhood, I love this from Ambleside Online. —–> The Early Years

I have prepared some books and curriculum, and have a loose plan of what I think our school days will look like, but want to stay very flexible to go with the flow! Follow interests, pursue things that are extra interesting and wait on things that are proving troublesome.

As a homeschooled kid myself, I am excited to be able to carry on the tradition! There are so many curriculum choices and schools of thought and methods… I have been up to my eyeballs in homeschool reading and articles and blogs and Instagram accounts!

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My little Ikea Raskog “literacy” cart!

Much of what I am going for this first year is based on what I have read about the Charlotte Mason approach to education. I am still reading about her philosophy, but I love the main ideas so far. Here are a few of the books I am reading if you are interested:

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The core of the “curriculum” for this year is called A Year of Playing Skillfully by Kathy H. Lee and Lesli M. Richards from over at The Homegrown Preschooler.

They wrote a rich and fun plan for using play based learning for your 3-7 year old. It seemed like the perfect fit for us this year to keep things fun and enjoyable but to help me stay on track and touching all the areas of learning that I want to. It is full of hands on projects, sensory learning, books, adventures, food and imaginative play, tied into teaching different concepts. I guess really, we ALL learn better through doing don’t we? I’m excited about it, such a great resource!

Language Arts – The next largest piece to our curriculum is the Language Arts program through The Good And The Beautiful. I am really excited about this as well.

This curriculum is supposed to be very comprehensive, no time wasters, or “twaddle” as Charlotte Mason would say… It seems very wholesome and is based on the desire to provide ” family, God, high moral character, wholesome literature, and the wonders and beauty of nature and human life” and combines several subjects in one (reading, writing, literature, spelling, grammar, vocabulary, geography and art! Holy moly!).

Streamlined and easy to teach without large teacher manuals and lots of prep work. They are reportedly a bit advanced, and very thorough, leaving no gaps. I ordered the K Primer first and decided it was too much for Ace to start off with so then ordered the Pre-K level. I want her to have a very firm grasp on the simple concepts before rushing to the next. We’ll see if this one is what we use all year, or if she goes through it and starts the K-Primer later on in the year. There really need be little worry about grade level when homeschooling… Making sure there is a firm foundation is the most important thing and then things fall into place so much better later on!

The Good And The Beautiful products are so very reasonably priced, it is almost startling! Where you can easily spend upwards of $200 for a language program elsewhere, this was around $40, and some of the levels are even free pdf downloads. There are FB groups especially for discussing the curriculum and sharing experiences. Very cool.

Bible –

A friend gave me a little book I think we will start with called ABC Bible Verses. We will work on memorizing short bits of scripture. I also really like the blog Happy Hymnody, and plan to print off their gorgeous free printable hymn of the month lyrics and sing and learn a hymn a month together. We also read Bible stories regularly and have a Brain Quest flip card set (we got it at a thrift shop, I don’t think they are easy to find) with questions all about the Bible story we read. Ace loves these.

Math –

Math will be all about counting 10-20 and beyond this year, one to one correspondence, patterns, measurements while cooking, etc. There are many math related activities that are in the A Year of Playing Skillfully book. I also have bought Cuisenaire Rods and a book to go with it, a Do-A-Dot marker set and book and we have a kids scale, and we’ll be doing lots of counting with beans and manipulatives and counting the calendar everyday.

I will not be using any formal lesson book for math just yet, and depending on how the year goes I’ll see if I think she could benefit from one, or if we’ll just wait until next year. The Good And The Beautiful has a K math course with activity box that looks great.

Science –

Science will be predominantly nature based this year. I have purchased a lovely eBook called Exploring Nature With Children. It’s a wonderful nature study with weekly themes, book lists, poems, and art and activity suggestions! We will be doing lots of outside adventures, walks, collecting specimens and studying them, and following along all the projects and experiments in the A Year Of Playing Skillfully book.

Ace has a small, handheld microscope for examining things she collects, and we have a great little nature book and journal that was a birthday gift to her from a friend! We will be reading many living science books (here is a definition of what a living book is, if you aren’t familiar) about nature and God’s beautiful creation.

I am hoping to join in on some nature group get togethers in our community that are following along with the Exploring Nature with Children study. I want her to continue to have a love and appreciation for the outdoors and want to know more about it! We will follow the interests as they come up!

Art –

Art is one of the most exciting areas for me, I have so many ideas and pins on Pinterest! I love that the Language Arts we are using has some art appreciation worked into it already, as well as AYOPS (I’m just going to give this long name an acronym!).

A Charlotte Mason method with art and young children is to introduce them to some of the great master’s works just by casually having prints available and displayed. One a month or so, talk about who painted it, where they were from, how they might have done it etc… Point it out occasionally and I may get a few books about that artist to read and do some projects inspired by the style.

I picked up a cute how-to-draw pets book that should be fun to play around with. Definitely plenty of free creating, painting, messy projects and clay, cutting, gluing, and collages! Yay!! But NO GLITTER! Just kidding, I’ll probably get talked into glitter. But just for the record, I HATE GLITTER. There, I said it.

Music –

Monthly hymns, plenty of classical, jazz, and other types of music playing in the home in general anyway. I would love to work together on the piano a bit, but we’ll see!

Handicraft –

This is another Charlotte Mason-ism, she believes that children should be carefully and purposefully taught useful skills and crafts to busy their hands and minds with. And she was specific that it should not be busy with “futilities” in their handicrafts, but to work on something lovely. I don’t know how that will go, haha, but I have in mind to try weaving with Ace, as she has been extremely interested in the past when she saw me working with a little loom. Wish us luck! It may, simply be a patience lesson for us both and nothing more!

Books –

The meat of our reading will be from library books. Every week or 2, we go to the library and load up. I may order some through Amazon if it’s not available at our library, or there’s something that I think we should actually own.

I have a list from The Good and The Beautiful website (for her appropriate age) that I will choose titles from, as well as when I pick a theme or topics that are of interest in science or art etc… We will always have a read-aloud chapter book going in the house, and Ace loves to listen to audio books. Right now, we are getting cds from the library, as she can handle them and start and stop the stories herself that way.

I started Little House on the Prairie with her recently, but I think it’s still a wee bit too much for her, I find she drifts. We read Sarah, Plain and Tall and she adored that. So I just need to find the right style and length of book. Mr. Popper’s Penguins was also a favorite! Definitely love stories with rich language, children of all ages soak up the words even if they don’t understand everything yet!

I’m sure I’ve forgotten to mention something that I should have, but this is the overall idea of our first year of homeschooling! And we are all so excited! I will leave some links below of things I am using, books I have been reading and resources I have found helpful while preparing for this coming school year. If you are also a homeschooling family, I hope you have a wonderful year, and please share with me in the comments! I love to learn from other moms!

HERE ARE SOME ONLINE RESOURCES I LOVE:

Ambleside Online A free, Charlotte Mason curriculum.

Happy Hymnody Printable hymn lyrics

The Good And The Beautiful Where our Language Arts is from and the big book list.

Raising Little Shoots Exploring Nature With Children eBook

Greta Eskridge A great blogger who is a huge encouragement to me. She talks about homeschooling and mom-ing candidly and from a believer’s perspective. She is most active on Instagram ( maandpamodern ), but has a lot of AH-mazingly helpful blog posts as well.

Home school Kindergarten & Home school Topics My Pinterest boards with tons of my favorite ideas.