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Beginning in May 2001, I decided to start homeschooling my daughter, Hannah. You can read about our first year, preschool level, here. All through our preschool year I searched for various titles I wanted to use for Kindergarten. About six months into my search, I now feel I have found all the resources I want to use for our upcoming Kindergarten year. Please check back soon as I'll be adding more to this page. NEW! A few weeks into our kindergarten year and I'm still really pleased with my method of organization. However, I've decided to change the form I use to log what we do each day. I've made it a simpler form, with room for two days per sheet (I print out on both sides of the sheet, so I can fit four days) and made it very generic... only filling in the section that pertains to that day (the stuff we actually did.) You can download a PDF of this sheet. I hope it inspires you to plan a form for your own homeschool needs. How about taking a look at our Art Gallery? See the paintings, drawings, projects, exercises, etc. that we are doing this year. (Updated regularly) ART APPRECIATION
After great debate as to what would best work as a gentle and fun introduction to art appreciation, I decided to use some of the wonderful books by Lucy Micklethwait & Sister Wendy Beckett. We will be taking these three books slowly, two pages at a time, through our school year. By Ms. Micklethwait, A Child's Play in Art, A Child's Book of Art, and by Sr. Beckett, A Child's Book of Prayer in Art. Additionally, I've chosen three other supplementary books should we choose to go quicker through the main titles, or just want more to look at. The supplemental titles we'll be using are: I Spy Two Eyes-numbers in art, I Spy- am alphabet in art, Puzzle Gallery- Games. You can see the planner pages I've made up to help guide me through these books. These planner pages are simple reminders for me to glance at when opening the book at hand, to see points of interests for each page spread we might want to discuss. We simply progress through one book, then the next. Ijust leave a book mark in the book where we left off. I check off each page spread as we do it. I hope these pages can be of help to ou should you choose to also use these books. AMERICAN HISTORY
Earlier this year, while at a used book store, I stumbled upon a gem of a book. It will be what we use for American History for kindergarten. Our Country's Story by Frances Cavanah (illustrated by Janice Holland, though there are other editions that use a different illustrator) is a wonderful, gentle history text that reads like a story book. Copyrighted in 1945 by Rand McNally, it starts from Christopher Columbus and continues through to World War II. Generally, each "section" is a two-page spread, easily read as a "lesson for the day." In the edition I'm using (by illustrated by Janice Holland) the illustrations are vibrant yet soothing, done in a beautiful array of colors and tones. We'll use this book as the "spine" for our kindergarten American History and will supplement as needed/desired from our home bookshelves and area library. Last I checked this book was available from used book dealers at http://www.addall.com (prices vary.) I have designed a complete set of tracer sheets to compliment our study of American history through this book. These use a dashed font in gray for the child to trace over. I wrote a short sentence or two about each section of the book. Under the tracer sentence is an area for the child to illustrate what was read about. (This is one of the narrations methods we'll be using for kindergarten.) You can download the tracer sheets as an Adobe Acrobat file (.pdf) which is broken up into a set of files. |