Your first curriculum

Moving up to the kindergarten years, I am sharing some of my favorite resources with you!  This is an awesome age!  Our objective is teaching children to read, write and add.   There are lots of choices!  You child’s learning style should  inform your choice.

Reading

These are my personal favorites:

I taught my children to read using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.  I started them both fairly young.  My oldest took to it immediately.  My youngest was frustrated and we put the book away three times, for three months each time, before she was ready to tackle reading.  It can’t be beat for cost effectiveness.  We then went on to the My First Bob Books: Beginning Readers, Set 1, for reinforcement, followed by the On The Farm with Farmer Bob readers.  Never push so hard that they hate reading.  From there she read the Elephant and Piggie books by Mo Willems and the Amelia Bedelia books.

Writing

To learn to write we used a wonderful curriculum, full of tactile manipulatives, Handwriting Without Tears, available at http://hwtears.com.  It is affordable, especially the non-consumable elements, making it ideal for families.  My “dolls” loved forming letters with the wood pieces, the clay, and writing them in shaving cream.  The program is a joy to teach – simple with lots of variety.

We used poetry and scripture for copywork and memorization.  My dolls know a number of lovely, short poems from those days.

Language

Memorization is an element to our favorite grammar curriculum, First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind, Level 1 (be sure to get the teacher’s book, too).  This program is easy to use, scripted for the teacher, and prepared us well for Latin and other language studies later on.  This is written by the author of The Well Trained Mind  (see my post on where to start researching homeschooling here).

When you are ready to start Latin, try Songschool Latin.  We worked our way through the entire Latin for Children series.  My oldest then took the National Latin Exam.

I provide links from Christian Book Distributors, a wonderful company, for convenience (you may notice I took down my Amazon links – Amazon was not very supportive of small operations), but when you are shopping, do not forget to support those small businesses that produce marvelous curriculum, tailored for homeschoolers.  Every year I enjoy reading through the Rainbow Resources catalog.  They provide detailed reviews for nearly every product they sell.  At over 800 pages, that is a lot of work they do on our behalf!  Check them out here: http://www.rainbowresource.com.  Stay tuned for my favorite history resources!