Curriculum Choices for Kindergarten + 2nd Grade
We are gearing up for another year of homeschool and we are so excited! One thing I’ve learned over the last 2 years is to keep things really simple, have lots of grace for myself and my kids, and trust that they are getting everything they need with daily faithfulness in the education and discipleship of our children. Our philosophy is that their entire day at home is education, not just when they are at the school table.
So much of their lives is an education — from packing backpacks full of supplies for a local elementary school, to playing soccer with inner city children and families, to exploring the vernal pool and life cycle of a frog in real time, to learning to clean up their dishes after a meal — this is ALL home education.
school schedule
Our school day usually takes about 2-3 hours, and then we’re done for the day. I try to focus our school time in the morning, and our schedule goes something like this:
7 am — kids wake up
7-8 am — breakfast
8-9 am — morning responsibilities. These include cleaning up breakfast, getting dressed, brushing teeth and hair, making beds and usually 1 other household chore together.
9-10 am — sometimes we start school right away and other days the kids play independently while I get some work tasks done.
9:30/10 am-12 pm — school time, all subjects!
Morning Time
We like to begin our school days with morning time…these are our “beauty subjects” of Bible, art, poetry, social studies, science, nature, etc. Morning Time is done with both children together. Here is what we are using this year for Morning Time:
I asked my husband to step in and do our family Bible time this year as a part of our morning time. We are hoping to do this during our breakfast hour, either while the kids are eating or at the coach after we’ve eaten, depending on time. He usually has to go to work around 8-8:15, so we have plenty of time to do a quick family devotion.
This book goes over family values and phrases, scripture to memorize and ways to help our children adopt these values.
Treehouse Schoolhouse Nature Study
this will serve as our Science this year, exploring nature through the seasons.
you can get 10% off with my code NATASHARED10 if you would like to try this curriculum or anything else in the THSH shop.
Beautiful Feet Around the World with Picture Books
I was introduced to this curriculum from the Home and Haven Conference this year and when the mama who introduced it showed all the gorgeous picture books I immediately fell in love. This guide uses the power of illustrations and literature to bring your children around the world — exploring different cultures, foods, languages, art, animals and history. This will serve as our Social Studies/History for the year.
You can buy the entire bundle with picture books included but I just opted for the teachers guide and will find the books at the library.
I also grabbed one of their notebooks for each child to go along with the notebooking portion of the curriculum.
This book is a compilation of several missionaries and their stories. I cannot wait to dive into these stories, some my kids will be familiar with, and some that will be new.
Learning about the faith of others, especially in seasons of suffering is so powerful for our own faith journeys in the modern world. It’s super important for my husband and I to pass on these stories of faithfulness and suffering to our children.
I wont be reading from this daily, but it’ll be an option in rotation.
We will be newly incorporating these Morning Time pages this year, since I still haven’t found an option I can stick to! I wanted my kids to have a daily check in with the date, calendar, weather and time but since they were pieced together in different curriculums we’ve used in the past, I admittedly haven’t stayed as consistent as I have wanted to.
I will have two menus — one for each child, with these morning time sheets and a dry erase marker to use.
Table Time
After morning time we will grab a snack (back to school snack prep post coming soon!) and head into Table Time. Table Time consists of our core subjects and I do this individually with each child for the most part at this age. Typically while I work with Reaghan, Everett is expected to play quietly near us, and when I work with Everett, Reaghan goes to her room to sit at her desk and work on independent math, reading or her handwriting pages.
Reaghan — 2nd Grade:
Language Arts Level 1 — we are about half way through this book. We took a break for the summer and will pick it up again in a few weeks when we start school. This is the perfect example of why we love homeschooling. She can technically still be in “first grade” language arts, but still be progressing right as she should be. This summer her reading skills skyrocketed without my prompting, and she is reading independently very well. So we have spent the summer giving her opportunities for reading and will finish this curriculum up in the fall. If we finish mid-year, I’ll move her on to Level 2.
Handwriting — We have been slowly going through The Good and The Beautiful Handwriting Workbooks Level 2 and it has definitely helped her penmanship a lot. I like having it to work through a few days a week because it focuses on proper alignment and spacing, whereas her other books that offer copy work don’t go over that at all. Once she finishes this book I will be ordering the new Cursive curriculum from Masterbooks that releases in October.
Everett — Kindergarten:
We started Everett with Kindergarten in the last few months of last school year. He completed the Masterbooks Math Level K extremely quickly and made headway a few weeks into the Simply K book. He will be finishing up his Simply K book this year.
Language Arts Simply K (so much more than a language arts!)