Skip to main content

Mini Man's and Little Lady's PreK/Kindergarten Literature Curriculum

When Big Buddy was in Kindergarten, we did a lot of monthly unit studies. You can see some of them here. However, now that Mini Man and Little Lady are Kindergarten/PreK I've decided to take a different route. Instead of doing unit studies we are going to focus on one great picture book a week.

This works well for our family because all our kids are book lovers. It's funny because it doesn't matter what book is being read aloud in our house, they will all gather as soon as they hear it. Another reason it works well for us is that Big Buddy's (classical) history and science curriculum take up any space we might have to focus on a unit. This also allows for all the children from, L (a child I babysit) age two, to Big Buddy age 7, to participate on some level.

a few of the book we will be covering

The books I have chosen are picked with Mini Man and Little Lady in mind. They are seventeen months apart with Mini Man having just turned five and Little Lady will be four in January. Jeremy and I have debated about "putting" them in the same grade and for now it seems to work. If you've ever homeschooled children close in age, I'd love to hear about what you did and how you handled it, etc. Like all children, they have their strengths and weakness so this year it's a mix between PreK/Kindergarten activities.

We will start each week by reading the book. Initially, we will talk about the cover and any predictions they may have. Then, I will slowly read the story asking them thoughts about the illustrations, guesses at what comes next, as well as highlighting any new words. When finished I'll ask them a few questions about the story. We will then reread the book a couple more times throughout the week. After the the second/third reading I'll ask them to retell the story to me or Jeremy. Later in the week we will also read some other complementary literature: same author, same theme, etc. Depending on how hectic the rest of the week is, we may do a some related activities, games, or crafts. 

In addition to the picture books, Mini Man and Little Lady will also be memorizing several Mother Goose poems. We enjoy The Real Mother Goose or Mary Engelbirght's collection. As well as reading through Aesop's Fables. They will also be working their way through Handwriting Without Tears, My First School Book and Math in Focus Grade K. When they are ready, we also plan on using the reading program, The Reading Lesson: Teach Your Child to Read in 20 Easy Lessons. We used The Ordinary Guide for Teaching Reading with Big Buddy and it worked...ok. In fact I still plan on using some of the rhymes and other tactics from that book, but this new one, however, looks a lot more hands on and less dry. I think this will especially work well with Mini Man. What are your favorite reading programs? 

Later this week I'll post about our first two books, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Over in the Meadow. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Red Cardboard Barn

We've finished our farm unit and are moving on to a new theme tomorrow - but before we do I wanted share the barn we made. The wooden farm animals came with a beautiful handmade ark that we gave Big Buddy for Christmas a couple years ago.  I would someday love to have a wood barn but it's currently not in the budget. So in the mean time we decided to improvise and make our own.  I stumbled upon this perfectly sized milk box (4 gallons per box) while subbing and thought it would be sturdy enough to handle play. Hubandie and the boys used an x-acto knife and wood glue to build a barn shape. to get the doors to fold out hubandie used an x-acto knife and scored the inside of the cardboard We then painted with a basic primer and outlined a window and a door with painters tape. cardboard is very porous so priming is a must if you want decent coverage Big Buddy however insisted that we add more windows so it looked like the barn in our book The Big

Preschool Syllabus: Dr. Seuss

Normally I'd do a Dr. Seuss unit in March around his birthday. We had to do one now though because on Saturday Big Buddy and I going on a date to a  Dr. Seuss exhibit . The exhibit is only at the museum until January and I'm afraid if we don't go now we might not get the chance. We are of course reading lots of Dr. Seuss's books. A great advatage to studying Dr. Seuss in November rather than March is that all his books were available at the library. I also found a great children's biography which is perfect for preschoolers. Pebble First Biographies: Dr. Seuss  We've read it a couple times and Big Buddy loves reciting all the facts he's learned WRITING CENTER ADDITIONS big buddy's name in sand paper letters, coloring pages  & mazes from seussville.com skills practiced: fine motor, letter recognition, creativity,  reading comprehension LEARNING "TRAYS" -   I rotate these, setting out about four a day from which the boy&#

Jack-O-Lanterns on the Fridge

Last fall I saw the idea for refrigerator pumpkins with face pieces in FamilyFun Magazine  and have been anxious to recreate them ever since. It was pretty quick and easy and since the only thing we didn't have on hand was magnetic sheets ($1.50 with coupon at Joann's) it was also very cheap. my supplies: magnetic sheets, orange & black construction paper, white pen, tacky glue *i know they have self adhesive sheets but my Joann's didn't carry them   glued (very messily) and ready to cut Both the boys were quite enthused when they discovered them after rest time :) Hopefully it will keep them entertained until we carve real pumpkins.