homeschooling adventures (year 3)

It's hard to believe we've finished our THIRD year of homeschool. How the time flies! Technically we just completed our Senior Kindergarten (SK) year, but we ended up doing a lot of grade one work. We still did three mornings (truthfully, sometimes it ends up being afternoons!) a week, which allowed us to go to playgroup one morning, and do errands/grocery shopping another morning. 

Here's how we structured our mornings this year:

Morning Meeting (15 minutes)

Calendar / Day Count 

Weather chart / Temperature

Bible Memory Work 

Morning Message

Working With Words (20 minutes)

1. Sight Word (aka "popcorn words" because they pop up everywhere in our reading!) practice - Monday: chant and cheer for the 5 new words

-Tuesday/Thursday: sight word practice games like bingo, go fish, read my mind, the stick game... from The Teacher's Guide to Four Blocks book.

2. Phonemic Awareness - using word-building lessons from Systematic, Sequential Phonics They Use

Guided Reading (10 minutes)

Reading a variety of predictable book and/or sight word books together, often re-reading favorite titles and writing and illustrating our own version of the book.

Writing (30 minutes)

1. Penmanship

-practice letter formation in a variety of ways (tracing in the air, finger tracing tactile letters, making them on forgiving surfaces like chalkboards/whiteboards/magnetic boards) while singing the corresponding Letterland rhyme/song. At the end of the year, we began printing them on 3-line paper.

2. Journal Writing

-encourage independent writing and illustrating using the classroom word wall and/or invented spelling, moving away from wavy "grownup writing" and "driting"

-introduction to some conventions of writing (left to right progression, simple punctuation, word spacing, use of capital letters) and using a writer's checklist by year-end to self-correct.

Math (30 minutes)

This year, we used the Jump Math grade one workbooks available for a very reasonable price on Amazon. (The primary grades at many of the private Christian schools are using this for their curriculum.)

Science/Socials/Health and/or Music (30 minutes)

Some of our themes included: Seasons/Holidays, Under the Sea, Insects.

Lunch Break

Self-Selected Reading (30 minutes)

Teacher Read-aloud

Independent Reading

Despite Covid, we still managed to take a few field trips:

Ameliasburgh Museum

Campbell's Orchard

Macaulay House Museum

A highlight for us this year was celebrating the 100th day of school together.

Unfortunately for us, homeschool takes a backseat to yard and garden work in the spring. Rather than end the year with a bang, we kind of fizzled out this year. However, by beginning our year in August, taking just one week off for Christmas, and skipping March Break completely, we were still able to put in 115 days for Kindergarten. All in all, it was a good year but we are definitely enjoying our summer break!

homeschooling adventures (year 2)

Welcome to a day in the life of our Kindergarten homeschool year! Many of you asked how we structured our homeschool days last year, so I thought I'd finally post something. We were so thankful to already be into a homeschool routine pre-Covid, so thankfully we did not experience any disruptions to our 2020-21 school year. Two days a week, we did our school work here at home, and one day a week, we met with a friend for a combined (preschool/JK) class.

Here's a look at how we structured our days:

Morning Meeting (15 mins)
Calendar 
Weather chart/Temperature
Day Count

Morning Message

We circled all the letters of the week and counted the words in each sentence. Later on in the year, we "buttered" the "popcorn" (sight) words we knew.

Language (30 mins)

We spent 3 days (1 week) on each letter of the alphabet. We would start each day by reviewing the Letterland letter and sound (from last year). We read the corresponding Letterland story and sang the corresponding Letterland song for the letter of the week. Then, using the corresponding Letterland rhyme, we would practice making the letter in a variety of ways:

  -in the air     -on a friend’s back      -on chalkboard     -on whiteboard      -other ________

On Day 1: 

We read “My __ Book” (soft-cover, teacher-made). 

1st time, teacher reads, pointing to each word.

2nd time, read together. 

3rd time, student “reads” independently, tracking the words.

-Students colour the pictures in their own copy of the book, circling Letter of the Week. 

On Day 2:

We sang “Who has a word that starts with __?

Who has a word that starts with __?

Who has a word that starts with __?

It must make the ___ sound!” 

Then we would show and tell all the items we could find around the house that began with the letter and sing

“____ is a word that starts with __,

____ is a word that starts with __,

____ is a word that starts with __,

____, ____, ____!” [sing sound 3x ]    for each object after they are shown.

On Day 3: 

We read “My __ Book” (hardcover series by Jane Moncure) and after reading, made a list of things on the chalkboard that began with that letter.

  A is For…

A is for apple.

A is for animal.

A is for astronaut.

We read the whole list aloud, pointing to each word as we said it. Then the student would “read” it back to me. Afterwards, we chose one sentence to illustrate. I wrote the sentence on paper, then cut it apart and we glued each word back in the correct sentence order to the illustrated page. We saved each picture in a book and at the end of 26 weeks, we had our own alphabet book.

Once Letter of the Week was done (after 26 weeks), we began the Word of the Week (from the list of Dolch sight words), and began to focus on more phonemic awareness activities (ie. beginning, middle, ending activities, rhyming/word families, blending/segmenting words).

Language/Fine Motor Centres (30 mins)

As per our play-based program, we did a lot of the following activities:

-Fine motor activities                             -Alphabet Puzzles

-Alphabet/Sound game                          -Writing Journal

-Phonemic awareness practice            -Read rhyming book                                            -Tactile name craft

Math (30 mins)

We covered the same topics as last year, just more extensively. Our units included counting, number sense, sorting, patterning, and shape activities and games, using ideas from Math Their Way, and Making Shapes and Building Blocks: Investigations in Mathematics.

Science/Socials (30 mins)

We covered a variety of themes, usually focused around the seasons and holidays. Due to Covid restrictions, we were only able to take a few field trips in the spring to visit some local farms.

We added music time during the one day a week we were with our friend. For Language follow-up, Olivia did some book work while our friend made the tactile letter crafts that Olivia had done during her preschool year .