Kindergarten!!

This week, we’ll be finishing up my “tweener” plan that accomplished its goal of making Hannah wait until she turns 5 to start the Sonlight Core A (the kinder core). Lots of people even wait until their children are 6 due to some of the content, but I think Hannah will be fine. The following is my plan for the next year:

This is what my Core A shelf looks like currently. We tend to get things all over the place in the course of our days and nights, but everyone knows that the books with the labels need to go back on their shelf. This will be more important now that I’m running Hannah in one set of books and Benjamin in another. Hopefully we won’t lose any ‘school’ books.

And this is my Language Arts (LA) shelf. Hannah has already read almost all the books in this set, but I’ve heard that other people also have this problem where the reading level is higher than the grammar/writing level. Most people allow them to read ahead and just have them re-read the reader section for the lesson of the day and plug along with the other work, so that’s going to be my plan. We can also get other readers from the library if she gets bored with our options. As of right now, she is pretty content to read and reread the same books. She’s really into the Dr. Seuss ones currently.

This year we also get to add in some more specific science activities. In the preschool cores, the science part was just specific books/stories that explain scientific topics well, but we’ll be having some worksheets, books, and experiments this year. This will probably be where I struggle more as it will require me to do a little bit more prep than I’ve been doing and also add in a “science time” to our day. We’ll see how it goes.

We also get this cool wall map. As we do our core books and come across places in the world, we’ll go to the map and mark/label them. Another thing that I’m excited about is called a book of time. Its basically a timeline with hundreds of pages showing I think 100 years per page spread. We get little stickers of people that we’ll get to color and put on our timeline as we go through our stories. This will be a book we keep adding to through all our years and will help the kids ‘place’ people and events in the grand scheme of history.

This is what our set of books look like except Hannah will be doing 1st grade handwriting and 1st grade LA (some of the books shown are Kinder LA). And I didn’t buy the manipulative set for the Math.
Individual images of core books
Individual images of science books

Overall, I think it will take 15-30 min for core, 15-30 min for LA, 15-30 min for science, 15-30 min for math, and maybe some art time. 1-2 hours per day. Not too shabby. 🙂

A list of all the core books:
A Grain of Rice
Beezus and Ramona
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Core A Tips – CD
Core A Instructor’s Guide
Dolphin Adventure
Dolphin Treasure
Egermeier’s Bible Story Book
Five True Dog Stories
Here’s a Penny
I Heard Good News Today
In Grandma’s Attic
James Herriot’s Treasury for Children
Johnny Appleseed: The Story of a Legend
Least of All
Little House in the Big Woods
Living Long Ago
Mary on Horseback
My Father’s Dragon
No Children, No Pets
Richard Scarry’s Please and Thank You Book
Sing the Word: From A to Z – CD
Sonlight’s Create-A-Calendar
The Arnold Lobel Book of Mother Goose
The Boxcar Children
The Complete Adventures of Curious George
The House at Pooh Corner
The Hundred Dresses
The Light at Tern Rock
The Llama Who Had No Pajama
The Story About Ping
The Story of Dr. Dolittle
Book of Time
Timeline Figures A
Twenty and Ten
Usborne Internet-Linked Children’s Encyclopedia
Wild Places
World/USA Markable Map with Markers

Science Books:
Science IG
Weather
How Flowers Grow
Isaac Newton and the Laws of Motion
Science Activities, Vol. 2
Discover & Do Level K DVD
Under the Sea
Caterpillars and Butterflies
Eggs and Chicks
Tadpoles and Frogs
Non-Consumable Science Supplies Kit
Science Supplies Kit A

Math:
Horizons Math K
Horizons Kindergarten Math Manipulatives
MathTacular®

Language Arts:
LA1 Instructors Guide
A Big Ball of String
Put Me in the Zoo
The Best Trick
A Fly Went By
Green Eggs and Ham
I Can Read It Book 1
I Can Read It Book 2 – new version
I Can Read It Book 3 – new version
I Can Read It! Word Lists
Little Bear
One Fish, Two Fish…
The Bravest Dog Ever
The Cat in the Hat
Explode the Code 1
Explode the Code 2
Explode the Code 3