1st 6 weeks of Kinder

We just finished up Benjamin’s 6th week of kinder (Core A) curriculum. It has been a bit longer than that in actual time, but with holidays in the middle. 🙂 I think he’s a pretty cute kindergartner!

Bible – There is a bible assigned to this core, but Hannah has been reading daily to us out of her Core B one, so Ben has been tagging along with that. She is very close to done, so we’ll start reading out of Ben’s for morning devotions soon. He’s also done 6 bible verses.

This core follows an encyclopedia (Usborne Children’s) as its main spine for history/social studies and for science. We will complete a full journey through history, so we started with cavemen, and moved on to early farmers, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and the vikings. We also use an Usborne book called Living Long Ago that has sections for clothing, food, housing of each culture. I think Ben liked the vikings the best so far! We’ve also read some early missionary stories, think St. Patrick.

For Read Alouds, we’ve completed The Boxcar Children, The Story about Ping, some Curious George stories, some James Herriot stories, Dolphin Adventure, and My Father’s Dragon. We also have a silly poem book and a mother goose book that we read selections from daily.

Reading / LA – So proud of Ben’s writing, he has great handwriting and does a good job on his copywork. He is ahead of where we are for reading, but we do the assignments anyway for practice (and because the writing comes out of his reading sets). I think he is a much more visual learner than Hannah. So far, he does better at spelling (but its still really early and easy) out loud. Hannah doesn’t ‘see’ the words in her head like he does. Also, his reading is helping his speech. It’s so fun to hear him actually self correcting his ‘L’ sounds, we’re still working on ‘th’. It almost sounds like he is saying words wrong, because I’ve gotten so used to hearing the way he says it. Yay!

Science has the same encyclopedia spine as the history. We have been doing water cycle, weather, natural disasters. We’ve also read an Usborne book on Weather and Tadpoles and Frogs. Daddy has been helping out a little bit with experiments since those usually fall off my plate. They’ve made a tornado in a bottle and let some dirt setting in water to see how it separates.

In math, Ben is working steadily along in Horizons K. He likes math more than Hannah (even though she is good at it too) and we usually get two pages a day done while Hannah does her one. That will slack off when we get to a little bit more difficult material.

Extras – Monthly book report club to practice public speaking and summarization, weekly PE, some field trips and play dates keep us busy the rest of the time. After baby, we may join a scout group called Navigators to work on some life and nature skills. We’ll have to see how things go.

Overall, we are having lots of fun in Core A!