Since Hannah has finished her official curriculum for kinder and since I don’t want to start the next year’s curriculum until the fall, we have to have a plan for January until around beginning of August.
Core and Science:
The backbone for our kinder year’s history and science was an internet-linked children’s encyclopedia. My current plan is to just restart this book and go through it again from cover to cover. Last time we jumped around in order to follow the subjects we were doing in the core and additional readings. We can skim past sections we don’t have much interest in and spend more time going deeper (using the internet links) on subjects Hannah is more excited about.
Read alouds:
We read quite a few books that have sequels, or are in a series, or are just by authors that have other good books. So for read alouds, we’re going to go through some of those. The following is a list of books I already have on hand and I think we have more than enough content to get us to August. I’ve ordered them in the order I think we’ll go through them and if we don’t finish, no big deal. Images of their covers can be found here.
Hero Tales
Ramona Quimby Age 8 (2 weeks)
Dr. Dolittle Tales (3 weeks)
Winnie the Pooh (1 week)
Haywood books (2 week each):
• Robert Rows the River
• Eddie’s Green Thumb
• Eddis the Dog Holder
Little House (3 weeks each)
• Little House in the big Woods
• Farmer Boy
• Little House on the Prairie
• On the Banks of Plum Creek
• By the Shores of Silver Lake
• The Long Winter
• Little Town on the Prairie
• These Happy Golden Years
• The First Four Years
Language Arts:
We still have a couple months of language study to do and after that we may just journal or write stories. Mostly I want to make sure Hannah goes through all the creative writing assignments and finishes her overview of kinder grammar. She’s fine for reading level and we’ll continue to have her read 10-20 min a day. Might even have her read some out of our read alouds.
Math:
We already began Horizons 1. We’ll be finished with it before Aug, so I suppose we’ll start Horizons 2 for her 1st grade year. If we have a gap, I’ll just have her work on her addition and subtraction facts on our little flashmaster game for 5-10 min a day to keep her fresh.
PE:
We’ll be doing our PE co-op through April. We might have to find something for both kids to do in the summer months, maybe swimming.
Extras:
Piano: We’ve decided to put Hannah in piano for at least the spring to see how she does and if she enjoys it. Both kids like to tinker around on our keyboard, so I think she will get into it, but we’ll see.
Cursive: Hannah has been asking to learn how to write in cursive, so we’ll try to squeeze that in. We’ve had good success with the Handwriting Without Tears books doing one page a day, so I think we’ll try that. HWT doesn’t place cursive until 3rd grade in their suggested order, but I don’t think it will be a problem to do it out of order. And if she really loves cursive, I guess we don’t have to do the other printing books.
Hopefully, this will keep us busy until August!