How Much is Enough in Kindergarten?
I always tell people that kindergarten is the perfect time to try out homeschooling, because the stakes are fairly low. If you totally bomb and decide to put your child in school after Christmas, they didn't actually miss all that much in the classroom that they can’t catch up. If you feel that they could benefit from another year in K, it's fairly easy to repeat. And as far as schoolwork in our homeschool goes, I'm pretty minimalist--phonics, math, and handwriting, total sit down time 30 minutes/day, maybe 3-4 days/week back when we were doing other activities a couple days a week. Less is more in the early years. You don't need a whole kindergarten curriculum!
My number one priority for kindergarten is getting the child reading. We use Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading because it works. We do handwriting only when they start to express interest, and we emphasize quality over quantity (one line of four well formed letters is worth more than a page of sloppy letters). You don't need to do a ton of worksheets when you are sitting with your child and know what she's learning. Worksheets have a place, but they can just be busy work, and a big reason we homeschool is so our children don't have to waste time on busy work! Imaginative play is so much more important at that age.
We’ve used Saxon math and start the kids in Saxon 1 in kindergarten but then work through it slowly, but you really could just do number fluency and patterns through play and be fine going into first grade. I can say this with confidence because my 8th grader who took things slow back then is two grade levels ahead in math now and is excelling academically without having lost the curiosity and creativity that we took the time to foster in those early years. It definitely didn't harm him at all to have all that extra time at age 5/6 to run around outside playing with sticks or be read a million books or play with legos for hours on end! I have never for one moment thought about any of my kids, “Oh, I wish I’d pushed more academics in kindergarten.”
That’s really all you need to do for kindergarten! Of course, that’s not all the learning they do—we set up our whole home to be a learning-rich environment. For one all-in-one resource that provides early learning activities themed around a classic children’s book, I can’t speak highly enough of Ivy Kids subscription boxes, which we use from preschool through second grade. We do lots of field trips when it’s safe to do so. I’d check out a bunch of booklists (I have picture book and chapter book lists), Reading Rainbow featured books, Caldecott winners, and books about books for inspiration, and just make an effort to get a huge stack of picture books from the library every week and read a ton!
My kindergarteners after my oldest also did Bible/history/science/poetry with their older siblings, but that was mostly listening (and memorizing, which we do while jumping on the trampoline or dancing, not sitting still). There's so much research about the value of pretend play at this age, so we really encourage that and do a lot of reading aloud, art/craft time, and legos/duplos type play while listening to music. Kindergarten is easy and fun for us.
A budget can be a real blessing because it can keep you from doing too much. Less is more!! Quality over quantity!! Many young moms do a million things and burn out, but the seasoned ones do a few things well and have children who flourish. Pace yourself.
I am now going back through our five year history cycle and six year science cycle a second time and am amazed at how much fun stuff we did in literally just an hour or two a day, a few days a week, when the kids were little and I was pregnant and breastfeeding! We obviously have more sit down work now with older kids, but you can accomplish so much when you're not doing busy work and not burning yourself out! When in doubt, read aloud more and sit still at the table less. Children flourish when they learn through play!
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