Our 5yo Kindergarten Curriculum

At the end of 2007 I posted our curriculum choices for 4yo kindy. Here, before I forget them in the haze of another year of home schooling, when Anna does her 5yo kindy year (some of which will include grade 1 level curricula), I will record the curricula we used in 2008. Some of these resources were initially chosen with only Joshua (the 5yo) in mind, but Anna (4yo) joined him and achieved admirable success as well, hence her progression to some grade 1 materials for 2009. Abigail has also joined us for Bible and Belief.

Bible and Belief
Joshua, Anna and Abigail have attended weekly BSF kids' classes while I have been doing the BSF Women's Day Class. This year, we learnt a lot more about Jesus the King and promised Messiah of the Jews as we studied our way through Matthew. 2008 was Joshua's last year of pre-school BSF, having attended for the studies of Ruth, Genesis, Romans and Matthew. I do hope that one day in the future he will be able to attend BSF school-age classes along with either Jeff or I in an Evening class. For 2009, though, I will continue with Day classes and Samuel will be old enough to join the girls and I for the first time.
We have also continued with our family Circle Time, although at times this has been intermittent. Jeff has taken over the telling, explanation and application of the Bible story and also led us in prayer. The kids coloured a Gospel Light picture for each story and just before Christmas I had them bound together into their very own story Bibles. I was amazed at the evidence of just how many Bible stories we had shared with them over the year.
I have continued to help the children learn memory verses. We started strong with this in the first half of the year, but learnt less in the later half, although we did learn some longer ones. Most of our memory verses were selected as we came across them in our tour through the Bible narrative; for example we learnt When all the people were being baptised, Jesus was baptised too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: "You are my Son, whom I love: with you I am well pleased." (Luke 3:21-22) in the week after we heard the story of Jesus' baptism. We learnt the Lord's Prayer as well. We have also learnt a few Bible verses which I have specifically chosen because they have given me a reason for the behaviours I am training my children in. Thus we learnt Philippians 2:14-16a: Do everything without complaining or arguing, so you may be blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked generation, shining like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life. This verse helped me explain my reason for the behavioural standards I was expecting and enforcing in combating Joshua's tendency to whinge and whine. We also learnt Colossians 3:23-24: Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. in order to exhort the children to a more pleasant and diligent attitude, towards their academic school work in particular, but also in many other areas of their life where they would rather make the easy choice than the godly one.
My other contribution to our family Circle Time has been teaching them a few songs that are familiar to them from church. We learnt "Away in a Manger", "Shout to the Lord", "Shine, Jesus, Shine", "In Christ Alone", "Amazing Grace" and "How Deep the Father's Love for Us". I mostly chose these simply by taking note of which songs I really liked at church, finding the words, and then singing them with the kids regularly. The exception to this was "Amazing Grace", which I began singing to Anna one night to help her calm down from a temper tantrum, which has since become the children's favourite from this half dozen. Anna and Abigail both still like to hear this song whispered in their ear when they get upset, and one precious memory from 2008 is the beautiful moment when Anna sang "Amazing Grace" to Abi. The other song we have learnt I wrote to help us learn Philippians 2:14-16a, and it's a great help to remind the kids by singing this song when they do get back into the habit of complaining.

Literacy
Having followed the instructions in Reading Reflex to teach Joshua to read according to "the basic code": words which have a one-to-one correspondence between the number of letters and number of sounds, and which use the primary sound for each letter, eg bat but not ball. I borrowed a set of Bob Books and then ended up buying a set for myself, and Joshua read his way through them for most of the year, finishing the fifth set and "graduating" to PD Eastman and Dr Seuss Beginner Books at the end of 2008. We also used six Ladybird Phonics books, each with three or four stories in them, but these were not a success as the vocabulary was uneven in it's phonetical skill development. Anna has worked through the first four sets of Bob Books and is now reading Dr Seuss books as well, although she is less fluent than Joshua.
One resource that made a big difference to the kids' understanding was the workbook Multiple Phonograms, the second workbook in a series produced by LEM Phonics. This book introduced the kids to the most common "multiple phonograms": where a single sound is represented by two or more letters, such as sh (a digraph) or oi (a dipthong). Exercises included copying the phonogram, reading words which have the phonogram in them and matching to the correct picture, finding and underlining the phonogram in words in series and in paragraphs, and review sections where the correct phonogram was selected from a list to fit the space in a word (with a picture to illustrate the word next to it), eg b__n [picture of fire] - the missing phonogram is ur. This workbook was a great help to both Joshua and Anna, but especially Joshua, in explaining to them (and helping me to reinforce) the way written English works. Anna will be continuing with the workbook series in 2009.
Another element of our literacy program was copywork and dictation, using text from a variety of sources. This went well and we kept it up for the first semester but in the later half of the year we did a lot less of this as we were using the phonics workbook, Joshua was writing more in other contexts and I didn't want to overwhelm them with our writing requirements.

Literature
We read a lot of great books during 2008, mostly selected based upon my memories of books I enjoyed in my childhood, or from books I have seen recommended numerous times and places as "children's classics". I posted our read aloud book list from 2008 here.

Mathematics
We have worked our way steadily through Singapore Earlybird Mathematics 2A and 2B, with both Joshua and Anna completing it successfully. I used or adapted many of the recommended concrete activities for each lesson, doing one or two pages each day. After we had done the concrete activity they completed the workbook page.
We also used Maths Mastermind Starter Level, which has play-based concrete activities for developing mathematical awareness in number, space & shape and probability. Colour Patterns was another play-based visual/spatial development tool which we used, and it came in useful for developing the kids' numerical understanding, particularly in examining the 100-table which comes with it, when they were learning to count by 10s and 5s. The kids enjoyed using these materials but we didn't use them nearly as much as I had planned. I want to use them (and similar resources) more regularly in 2009.

Science and Geography
We worked our way around the continents of the world reading non-fiction library books and some fiction picture books about the well known fauna and some flora of each continent as we studied a little bit about it's geography. One of my favourite resources was National Geographic's online website, especially their animal pictures to colour and their free, customizable atlas printables.

Not-at-home-schooling
Joshua took Karate lessons throughout 2008 and in the second half of the year he joined the local Boys' Brigade group for his age, Anchor Boys. We enjoyed play dates with our homeschooling friends the B family as well. And there were numerous excursions to the Perth Zoo, the Aquarium of Western Australia, Yanchep National Park as well as enjoyable and educational holidays at Granny and Gramps' hobby farm at Albany.