We ‘officially’ ended our school year on Wednesday alhamdulillah. Complete with the whole 9 yards: graduation, certificates, report cards, and yearbooks. My boys were so happy, especially 5M who has been talking about his cousin graduating for weeks. (It’s what inspired the whole last-day-of-school thing to start with.) And it was an opportunity for their Baba to get an in-depth look at their work and accomplishments.
We’re now taking a 2-week break, and then its Back-to-Homeschool for us. So I thought I’d take this time to share what we used for Kindergarten, what worked for us, and what didn’t.
To see pictures and to peek inside the books, go to my Instagram where it is saved under the “K” story highlights.
PHONICS
–All About Reading 1: We did from Lessons 1-17…that’s consonants and short vowel sounds. It was the perfect open-and-go synthetic phonics curriculum.
We used the Parent’s Manual, the readers, and the phonograms+word cards. And I have wooden alphabet coins which we used as a moveable alphabet. But we did NOT use the activity book or letter squares/ app. Why? I bought the non-consumable things second-hand. I would have had to buy the consumable activity book separate. But the repetitive nature was something which I thought 5M would have resisted, so I did not bother opting instead to make up complementary activities as we go along. In the end, I didn’t make up anything as ETC and other readers we had provided more than enough practice.
–Explode the Code 1 & 1.5: These paired nicely with that specific section of AAR 1. (After this, the two programs do not line up anymore). It’s a nice workbook-style approach to get in more reading and spelling practice. We used it to replace the activity book part of AAR. We did not do much of the handwriting parts as it involves quite a lot of handwriting for this age group in my opinion. The only handwriting we actually did was the spelling-style list of 8 words at the end of each lesson. I had 5M do these words in his Schoolnest spelling notebook.
–BOB Books- Set 1: These 12 books were nice independent readers at the perfect level. 5M loved picking up a few and reading them on his own. It really helped boost his confidence in his reading ability masha Allah.
–Fast Phonics: This is part of the Reading Eggs app suite of programs. Its an accelerated synthetic phonics game. They also have Reading Eggs, which is a synthetic phonics program with more practice and a slower pace, but 5M didn’t like the slow pace. And the cherry on top: the accompanying worksheets that are available free to download/print with every single lesson.
MATH
–Math with Confidence K: This open-and-go mathematics program is one of the best I have seen. It’s very hands-on with lots of around-the-house games and very little worksheet-type activities. It is a mastery-style approach with spiral-based review practice at the beginning of each lesson. It is touted as laying a strong and sound mathematical foundation which is exactly what I was looking for.
I did the entire book with 5M as the style of mathematical thinking it promotes is valuable in my opinion. But we breezed through the concepts he already knew, doing 2-4 lessons in one day sometimes. We laso skipped the spiral review sections for concepts I knew he had grasped quite well.
–Mathseeds: This is another program available through the Reading Eggs app subscription. Lessons 1-50 of the game correlates to a kindergarten curriculum. And like all the Reading Eggs programs, it comes with free to download/print worksheets for each and every lesson. I printed them to give 5M to complete whenever he wanted to do ‘more school’.
WORKBOOKS
–BrainQuest K: We bought this on Amazon and used it as extra work for whenever my worksheet-loving child wanted more work. It covers a wide range of subjects from phonics to math to social studies and science.
–Mathsmart K: We also got this on Amazon as 5M absolutely loves math worksheets (English not so much). This was a nice practice and intro to numbers 1-20 and we did it before jumping into MwC (which is completely not necessary).
This was the extent of our loosely structured kindergarten year. For science, etc we borrowed library books and used those as jumping-off points for discussions and further learning.
Hope this helps you get a little idea about these curriculums. And feel free to reach out if you have any unanswered questions.
Don’t forget to check out the instagram “K” highlights to see inside these books and see how it worked for our family.
All the best on your Kindergarten homeschooling journey!
