Homeschooling a Kindergartner

I thought I'd do a quick post and share what I am doing with my kindergartner for school. I know there are big fancy curriculums out there that I could use, but based on the time I have I have decided to make things as simple as possible. I have two older children (16 and 10), and then three younger children (5, 2, and 1). Maybe some of you are in the same boat as me...so I thought I'd share a bit how we have chosen to do things.

My two older children mostly work on their own, coming to me with questions as needed. We do all our history and most of our science all together in the afternoons, but the older two do their math, language arts, reading, etc. on their own.

In the morning while my older two are doing their schoolwork, I take some time to work with the younger ones. The following is what I am doing with my 5-year-old son:

LEARNING TO READ: I am currently using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and love it! It only takes about 15-20 minutes to sit down and work through the lesson with my son. I then have him do the writing worksheet that goes with each lesson. Those worksheets can be downloaded for free at this website. We usually do 3 to 4 lessons a week. We are on lesson 21 and so far my son is really enjoying it. This book is fairly inexpensive and is one I highly recommend, especially if you have other children who take your time. You CAN have time to teach your little ones to read and enjoy it too! This book is not consumable, so it can be used over and over with each child coming up!

BASIC MATH SKILLS: I found a neat workbook that I am using for math. It is called Advantage Math: Kindergarten, and can be found in ebook form here. I just have my son do 1 page a day (we only do 3-4 per week however). He is really liking it. It starts out very basic and has been pretty easy so far for him. But I don't want to overwhelm him at first anyway, so it has been great.

One reason I liked this in ebook format is that I can use it for my other two younger children when they are ready. In fact, I might use this series up through 4th grade. After that, I like the Teaching Textbooks for math. Teaching Textbooks currently has curriculum for 5th grade through high school. I see the Grade 4 books will be released soon too. I LOVE this series of math books (my 4th grader and 10th grader are currently using these and love them!) and plan to use them after the beginning years of math instruction.

BIBLE: I have been using this Day by Day Kid's Bible to read to my younger children each day. It is written in an understandable way...so that my 10-year-old on down to my 2-year-old can understand it. I love it and the kids look forward to our reading each day. This would also be a perfect Bible for kids to read on their own. I have just chosen to do our reading all together for now. You can buy this Bible here.

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Besides these three basic areas, my younger ones enjoy watching science and history DVDs with the older children, playing games together, cuddling and reading books, etc. As you can see, homeschooling a kindergartner does not have to be hard, take a lot of money, or a lot of time. They can learn the basic skills they need through these few "books" and the rest they can learn simply through living life together.

I hope this is an encouragement to those of you who may feel you are not giving the time needed to school your kindergartner. Relax! You CAN do this! Get on your knees, seek the Lord's direction, then get a hold of these few resources to get you started. Have fun...and enjoy those kids!