What Kindergarten Should Look and Feel Like

Please forgive the very picture heavy post.  We had such a fantastic day today that I ended up with 200 photos and it was way too hard to pick just a few.

We read "The Way I Act" and created this poster to remind us all year long.

Today was the type of kindergarten day I hope we have each week, all year long.  It was full of laughing, excitement, reading, light bulb moments, friends, hugs, dancing, painting, math, writing, and sharing.  I love singing our welcome song with ASL, it is such a fantastic way to start the day.  Maybe soon I'll film it and share it with you so you can join in the fun.  After a little discussion about which hand is right and which is left we tucked our left hands behind our backs and practiced shaking hands and introducing ourselves and sharing about our favorite animals.  

 We had a most fantastic group reading lesson today.  I LOVE sharing with kids a few key strategies to help them learn to read.  Today we talked about the things good readers do.  I talk about this ALL THE TIME over on the preschool blog.  I encourage kids to LOOK at the letters, POINT to the letters, make the letter SOUND, and LISTEN to the sound they're making.  It is SO FUN to watch their eyes light up as you tell them that all they have to do is follow those instructions and it will immediately make them a reader.  Many kids came home with the Letter M book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  We'll be working our way through her mini reading books throughout the year with the appropriate group of students.  Share in their joy by having them read their new book to you at home!

Play dough with loose parts and the toy center during our reading time.

Every day we spend time drawing and writing in our journals. Then we share our journals with the whole group.

 After writing comes science, and it was another AMAZING time of our day.  Today we talked about archaeologists, magnets, and color.  This month we're exploring our year long main topics in short spurts during our science time.  We'll get more into these concepts throughout the year.  Today we repeated magnets from last week and introduced color blending and archaeology.  We had a big table top sand box with dinosaurs, scoopers and paint brushes at the archaeologist center.  The color center was a HUGE hit.  There were color mixing jars to shake, color wheels to paint, and shaving cream color mixing.

 By the time we were done with science there were a few of us covered to our elbows in either shaving cream or sand.  In some cases: both.

A quick art lesson about glue.  Draw a speck, a dot, a puddle and a lake.  Talk about the size of each.  Then on one piece of paper demonstrate a speck of glue, a dot of glue, a puddle of glue, and a lake of glue.  Through a little discussion kids can come to the conclusion that a dot of glue is the appropriate size of liquid glue to use for a project.

We continued our conversation about how families and friends are important and help each other during our art time.  Many of the children were able to bring family photos and some even had a list of people in their family.  Thank you to the parents for supporting that!  We then were able to share about our families and make our own family trees.

 Our first lesson on identifying instruments and the sounds they make was amazing.  It was fantastic to hear from kids who could identify orchestra instruments and how to play them (in the air).  Many have siblings that play an instrument that we explored today.  As we listened to the instruments we also practiced air playing them.  Then we danced around to a variety of operatic scores.

 Subitization is a fancy word for being able to recognize a group of objects as a number without needing to count.  Think about how you look at the roll of a die.  If it lands with 5 dots on top I'm quite certain you don't count the dots every time.  You just know that that arrangement is 5.  That's what we're going for in kindergarten right now.  After we played some subitization games each child received a piece of paper to draw and write all the different forms of one number that they possibly could.  Then we shared our work with our class.  As we share our work and discussion of numbers and their representations we increase our mathematical vocabulary.  

 As this is my personal blog and I am a homeschooling mom I like to highlight the fun things that EMan did during his Options school day.  I don't get to see much of CJ during school (he's in the second grade group) but EMan I have direct access to for this school year :).

I hope everyone has a fantastic weekend!  Happy learning!

Our First Book Club - "The Wright Brothers" and "Alexander Graham Bell"

Our homeschool group (LEARN) is simply fantastic.  We are a group of parents that get along really well and each carry a portion of the weight to accomplish all our educational goals for ourselves and our children. One of the great moms in our group has decided to host a monthly book club for the kids.  Since each of our children are on different reading levels this, at first, seemed like a challenge.  We talked through the idea and sorted a way that is working fantastically.  Each monthly book club is focused on a theme.  As a group we're spending a lot of our time talking about ideas, inventors and developments from the historical time of the American Industrial Revolution in many of our play dates and activities.  Book club has naturally become a great forum for talking about the inventors.  Each month a new inventor is the theme.  Our first book club was based on "The Wright Brothers".  By having a theme each child can read or have a book read to them on their appropriate level.  Then they prepare something to share about what they learned at book club.  Each child has a time to share their presentation on the same theme, we can discuss what we've learned and participate in a group activity.  (Simply due to the illness that late winter provides, our first book club was combined with the second scheduled book club.)

Some of the presentations were colored pictures, some where memorization, others were journal entries (the written narration).  I'm sure as we go on the presentations will also take many other forms. CJ is working on finding his voice in a public speaking environment and this is a perfect, small and well known crowd to practice on.

I simply love the way this book club is working out.  We get to spend free afternoons reading and exploring together and then reporting our learnings to the whole group at the end.  For the Wright Brothers we spent days reading small portions of the text and then exploring the concepts in different ways.  None of it was lesson planned, we just went with the flow.  We worked on our lap book, made paper helicopter toys and paper airplanes, practiced flying and tipping our wings the correct way and even measured our wingspans. 

While working on Alexander Graham Bell we watched the Animated Heroes video, worked on our lapbook and learned about using tubes to amplify our hearing.  It was great to then go to book club, share what we learned and then make tin can telephones as a group. 

This format is working fantastically and we're so excited to continue it each month!

Library Visits and a Start of Narration

We stopped at the library yesterday to start getting acquainted with what was there.  CJ was very excited to pull different books off the shelf and look through them.  He asked me to read a number of different passages in nonfiction text that was interesting to him.  One of the reasons that we stopped there was because CJ will be having a community drama class there every week and I know from experience that if I expose him to a new surrounding before he has to participate in anything he does much better.  Plus, making a visit to the library every week seems like the right thing to do as a homeschooling family. 

One of the lessons that we'll be working on all school year is narration.  It's the idea of reading a text once and being able to retell the story in your own words with some quotes from the text and oodles of details.  CJ really struggles with this so we're working on short stories first.  I hope that this will also help him be able to tell us about his day with more detail.  Today we narrated Pete the Cat and CJ was so funny in his narration.  He even sang a bit of the song from the book to me.  Narration comes from the Charlotte Mason approach to education.  I tend to read many different ideas and books throughout the summer, pick and choose what I like from each of them, and try to apply them throughout the school year.  The chance of me reading another philosophy book until next summer is really slim to none, how about you?

Kindergarten, Day 4

So many blogs out there show you all the nice looking, happy kids, perfect pictures type of homeschooling experience.  I intend to show you reality.  Some parents find themselves questioning over and over if they are doing a good enough job and if they are doing what is right for their kids.  There are good days and bad days.  There is also the opportunity to learn from your mistakes and make the next experience better.  As a homeschooling parent, you also get to know your child in a manner that you may not have seen before.  I've been learning a lot about CJ.  He has introverted tendencies and is easily embarrassed by things that are different, out of the norm, or appear to have a "rule" he doesn't know about. 

Today was day 4 of Kindergarten, and it was the FIRST day that Cooper chose to stand and do the Pledge of Allegiance with me.  We've I've done it every day since day 1. I stand, put my hand over my heart.  Look at the flag magnet that we have and point to the words as I say the Pledge out loud.  For the first 3 days he looked at me like I was crazy and performing some awkward ritual that he wasn't sure about yet.  Today he stood by me.  It took a little encouraging, but he stood.  That's a small victory.  I can only imagine that if he'd never done the Pledge before and he entered a public school where they were to do it.  That would be a scene that wouldn't go well.  He'd either be ignored or forced into participating and I'm certain that wouldn't go down well.  I wonder what other things I should think about and do with him before he has to do them in the world....

 We're continuing to work on place value and counting by tens.  I've pulled out my old straws counting pocket chart from my teaching public school days and I've let him play and explore with it. He doesn't fully understand that there can only be up to 9 in each place before it has to move into a bigger value.

First Day of "Official" Kindergarten

Today was our first "official" day of kindergarten.  We've been doing math and reading all summer long, but we're starting a new schedule with the start of preschool next week.  Each morning CJ and I will spend one hour together working on kindergarten work.  We'll do 20 minutes of scripture study, 20 minutes of math, and 20 minutes of reading.  We'll do plenty of learning throughout the rest of the day including play dates with friends based on our science curriculum, extra reading or math time together, etc. You can see our "Setting Up For Kindergarten" blog post here. 

 We're well on our way in our TouchMath Kindergarten curriculum and we're working on many varied reading skills.  I'm pulling from a number of different resources for reading, however one of the more prominent sources is the Moffatt Girls. Annie is fantastic and seems to always be creating things just as I figure out that I need them.

Learning to Type

Learning to type seems to be a very important task that kids start to do at a younger and younger age.  I used to be "pushing the envelope" when I started a typing club for my 2nd graders (7-8 year olds) just over 7 years ago.  Now my Kindergartner (a 4 year old) is using the same software and being just as successful as they were.  The software is old and will only work on an older computer but it is worth having that older computer hang around to be a kids computer.  The software is a CD-ROM called Disney's Adventures in Typing with Timon and Pumbaa.  If you have a computer to run it on it is SO worth it, but check the specks first.

My boys play this for hours.  The learn to sit up straight (oops, I'm severely slouching right now), keep their feet on the floor and their fingers on home row.  They practice a series of letters and spaces and then they get to play the "shooting bugs" game.  I've found it universally exciting for both boys and girls.  They learn to type letters first (in a specific sequence of home row first followed by keys that involve reaching).  After they've mastered the letters (it keeps track of accuracy and they can't move on until they get a certain percent correct) they get to move onto higher and higher levels, typing words and then even paragraphs.

I find it's an awesome game that CJ pulls up during his independent study time.  He's practicing the basics of reading and learning exciting new computer skills at the same time. 

Reading A-Z

I use the Amazing Action Alphabet to teach my kids the basics of reading.  We do the preschool program through 2x and then they're ready for something more challenging.  We've started using Reading A-Z and RazKids.com to read appropriately leveled books.  I love the books and the interactive elements that are provided for each text. CJ can read books on his level or he can listen to books that are too difficult for him to read alone.  He can access the books on the computer or the iPad, making a whole book library very transportable!