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!

Options Kindergarten - Our First Full Day

We had so much fun on our first full day of Options Kindergarten.  We started the day off singing our good morning song with ASL.  I was impressed with how many kids remembered it and how many commented that they taught it to a brother or sister or sang it for a parent.  Next we read "How Full is your Bucket? For Kids".  It was a fun opportunity to give a book to each child and allow them to read and follow along.  They are able to enjoy the pictures, follow along in the book by turning one page at a time to match what I'm reading aloud, and even follow along with the words.  I take the opportunity to give my students as many books as possible throughout the year.  This is possible because I participate in the Scholastic Reading Club and every time a parent orders books it gives the classroom points to earn free books.  I strategically pick those free books to match our lesson plans and give each child their own copy to keep at home.

 As we're still learning our routines and expectations we had very similar centers during our reading time as we had on our first day of school.  We made foam crayon name crafts, we played with play dough and loose parts, and we explored the toys and small classroom library.  After centers we explored our science activities.  The kids were SO EXCITED!  We used the loose parts from the play dough play to experiment with a bucket of water to see what would sink and what would float.  We also explored magnets and started making body maps.  The body maps were super exciting as each child got to lay down on a large sheet of paper and have their outline traced.  They then took it to their own space in the room to add details to their drawing.  It's a project we'll be working on for a while with our "Who We Are" inquiry block.  After gym class and lunch we read one of my favorite books "I Ain't Gonna Paint No More".  Then we got busy painting with water colors!

 We spent time talking about drawing pictures and writing words to match and then wrote in our journals.  The kids did a fantastic job and it was fun to watch them take center stage to share their drawing and writing with the class.  We will keep the journals at school and send them home at graduation.  It will be so fun to look through and see their growth in writing!  During music and movement we read a book called "Loud and Soft".  It is all about the different animals of the world and if they make loud sounds or soft sounds.  We took some time to dance and move like animals to the song "Animal Action" by Greg and Steve where it instructs kids to move like different animals.  They had a hoot!  The teacher next door popped her head in and asked if we were imagining we were animals because she was hearing weird sounds :).

 For math we played a few different games.  We learned how to play "Staircases" where we took turns rolling the dice and making a tower the same number of blocks tall.  The first person to have a staircase of block towers 1-6 tall was the winner.  Next we played "Build a City".  It is very similar with rolling the dice and building towers, but this time we added our towers to a city block and at the end stacked all our towers together to make skyscrapers!

 We had a fantastic day of exploring concepts that we'll be working on all year.  We really nailed down our routines and will be ready to jump in again next week!

TouchMath Kindergarten Homeschool Review

TouchMath has been a program that I have utilized both for my own kids and for various preschool classes.  Please visit the Preschool TouchMath Review Link on June 12, 2013.  I have found that TouchMath is a terrific foundation for teaching and learning basic math skills.  CJ has been exposed to the preschool TouchMath program for multiple years both for his own learning and being present while I was teaching his brother.  The preschool program by TouchMath has prepared CJ for a life of success in Math.  This became obvious to me when CJ was able to complete the assignments quickly, and quite often independently, throughout the TouchMath Kindergarten curriculum.  CJ was quick, accurate, and confident in his Math skills.  Topics that were not yet mastered were clearly introduced and set up for students to quickly gain confidence and mastery.   

Touch Math generously provided us with the TouchMath Kindergarten program for Review.  It came in the form of a digital download (PDF files) that I then was able to load onto my iPod Touch (or easily to another tablet or device).  I sorted through the files to find the student work pages and printed them in sets.  The curriculum has four main units. 

Unit A: Counting, Adding and Subtracting within 5

Unit B: Adding and Subtracting within 9

Unit C: Understanding Numbers 1-20

Unit D: Measurement, Data and Geometry 

Each of the four main units is broken into 6 sections.  Follow this link and click on the unit title to see the sections of each unit. This worked for me because I was able to bind the student pages into two packs per unit.  It made it much easier to have a smaller pack to carry around and work on.  Other curriculums that come pre-printed and bound are quite large for the whole year.  Not easy to carry up the flight of stairs with your pencil box for days you wish to do school in a different room. It's conveniently printed in black ink only, however I did feel that there is much wasted paper space.  It is part of the TouchMath model to not have instructions that are unreadable to younger students cluttering up pages, but I felt that many of the pages could easily have been printed 2 per page and saved a few trees along the way. 

When we sat down to do math I could easily reference the lesson plans on my iPod to guide the learning activities for the day and CJ could pull out his bound pack of student work pages.  We ended up utilizing pencils, crayons, scissors and glue throughout the curriculum.  It was also handy to have other manipulatives around (poker chips, unifix cubes, place value straws), though only a few of them were specific TouchMath products (TouchNumerals with Base 10, Texture Cards, TouchShapes).  

The Kindergarten Curriculum contains much of the same concepts that are introduced in the preschool program.  These concepts are now expected to be mastered in Kindergarten.  Some pieces were extremely easy for CJ.  He had done the preschool program for 2 years and mastered some of the concepts in the process.  We still went through every page, though often there were elements that he sped through to "get to the exciting stuff!" (addition).  The foundation of Touch Math is invaluable and has supported all my students in a life-time of confidence in Math.

Overall, I'm impressed with the Kindergarten TouchMath curriculum.  CJ and I both look forward to diving into the First Grade TouchMath curriculum right away.  He loves math and is eager to tackle the challenges of bigger numbers in addition and subtraction as well as learning more about measurement, time, data and geometry.  Bring on the math!

Into September 2013

We've made it into September of our first "official" homeschool year.  I feel like things are going swimmingly.  It is quite often that CJ wakes up early and we're able to get our lessons done for the day before EMan even wakes up.  We've been continuing our work on our TouchMath book which has now shifted into simple addition up to 5.  CJ has really taken to it and is mastering it quite a bit faster than I had previously expected.  CJ has still been struggling with numbers to 100 which TouchMath introduces in their first unit but doesn't take the idea to mastery.  We've opened up our MathUSee Primer to start working on the basic understanding of place value of numbers to 100.  It's slow work, but eventually we'll get there.  The boys are enjoying more laundry responsibilities these days and are loving our reading time together. 

Not the Best of Times

Homeschooling is not always the best of times.  We have moments that we struggle with every day.  We're continuing to work on number identification up to the #30 with a 100 chart and the straws pocket chart.  In order to make the work easier I requested that CJ order his number cards from 0-9.  This started a complete melt down and tantrum.  Sometimes we have to note that our child is having a tantrum because the work is in a frustrational stage (meaning it's too difficult for them), sometimes we have to recognize that everyone has bad days or mornings/evenings and it'd be better to pick it up again at another time, sometimes we have to recognize that they are pushing buttons and pulling strings to get out of something and we'd do better to hold our ground as the parent.  It's hard being a parent and figuring this out, but wouldn't you rather figure it out than let a teacher with 25 or even 30 other kids to attend to try and figure it out?  There are great teachers out there, but the quality that an individualized instruction provides our kids is worth the extra work, knowledge and relationship that we will build with them.   

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.

We've had a fantastic vacation visiting our family in Utah.  The boys are so excited about the kindergarten science plans I have.  We'll use the MythBusters Science Fair books and pick out activities that look great to us. While riding on the airplane the boys flipped through the books and marked anything that was appealing.  We have also been working on our TouchMath PreK unit 1.  CJ is struggling with the written form of larger numbers (most numbers with a ten and a one).  I love that one of the pages was a dot to dot to make a picture.  CJ wasn't in to coloring it but enjoyed the dot to dot part.  It's the type of page that I wish I had laminated though so he could do it over and over again.  It's a fun way to get in repetitive practice of numerals in order. On our trip we enjoyed being outside, exploring the aviary and jumping lots on the tramp!

TouchMath Kinder - Getting Started

We've gotten the TouchMath Homeschooling Kindergarten curriculum to try out for the year.  CJ used the TouchMath PreK curriculum for the past 2 years and I felt that it was one of the most comprehensive PreK curriculums out there.  Check out my review of it here. Were were excited to get the Kindergarten curriculum in our hands and start putting it to work.  We took it along with us on vacation as a little extra brain work during down time.

I like that the TouchMath Kinder pulls in many different science mini lessons into the math lessons.  They talk about a nautilus shell and penguins being birds for example.  The Kinder starts simple enough, starting with tracing the numbers and doing dot-to-dot type activities.  CJ is still struggling with the tens (like 30, 40, 50, etc) and asks what comes next for almost all tens.  Upon being told the tens he can count to 100 by 1's. I'm looking forward to using the TouchMath Kinder and hope that it addresses his misunderstandings in depth rather than just glossing over the concept.  Time will tell!