How to homeschool kindergarten can be overwhelming, but with a few tips, I hope it can bring ease and confidence in your child’s learning.
Do Not Compare and Despair
What do you want to accomplish and see your child thriving? Kindergarten is the most opportune time to foster joy in learning and to gain confidence.
“Is my child falling behind?” is a parent’s worst nightmare question. Scary enough, the question is rooted in fear, comparison, and peer pressure.
Compare and Despair
Compare makes you despair. As God’s perfect masterpiece, your child is perfect where he or she is. Do not give in to false conceptions that your child is not better at reading or any other subject matter or that you have to start earlier and cover more materials than others in the public school system. Before you know it, your child will perceive your fear and be frustrated and embarrassed. He or she might even develop anxiety symptoms trying to gain attention through different means.
Give Assurance and Confidence
Matter of fact, there is not enough time to enjoy your time with your child than worrying! As you delight your child’s first step of walking, there are a lot of milestones that you can cherish with your child and celebrate their success.
Start with the Vision
Teaching two older siblings, I knew that I didn’t have an amble time to teach my Cutie Pie. But one thing that I knew was that I wanted Cutie Pie to have fun, love learning, and love to read.
I considered much about ‘How to teach kindergarten with little time on hand?’ Read more about setting a vision statement for your homeschool here, and setting up rhythm and routines.
Lay Down the Basics
What do you want your child to learn? I’ve made the following list of benchmarks:
- Pledge of Allegiance
- Calendars through Circle Time
- Months of the Year
- Days of the Week
- Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
- Seasons
- Weathers
- Books of the Bible
- Feeling Words
- Alphabet Sounds, Short & Long Vowel Sounds
- Nursery Rhymes
You can cover several math concepts and switch to other math concepts that you want to cover.
- Counting Numbers
- Tens Frame
- Place Values
- Writing numbers in word form (e.g. one, two…)
- Tally Marks
- Graphs
- Shapes
Learn through Songs
Kids love to sing and love to sing along and repeat. You may be thinking of the baby shark song, but there is so much that kindergarteners can learn from songs. Here are a few that we used. When kids are used to the song, I do not play the video to get their minds off of devices.
Books of the Bible can help set the foundation when your child is ready to look up the Bible on their own!
Hands-On Approach to Learning
Kids also love hands-on learning. Instead of pointing your fingers at the calendar, you let your child use pointers to point or let them use a sticker to place one inside one tens frame to teach place values. Just make sure that kids do not play with teachers’ materials as they will no longer consider it a privilege. Feel free to make these items from what you have such as kids’ magic wands. Kids get excited about all the privileges that they can get. If you have a kindergartener who is fidgety, circle mats really help to stay in their circle. Also, make sure to give positive reinforcement when they do well, not negative attention when they misbehave.
I also saw these beautifully-made wooden calendars from Etsy. Since I had older ones, I had a simple Calendar & Weather chart with other pages like books of the Bible, months of the year, and days of the week printed and laminated and put in binders.
After circle time, I had a weather bear printable and other multi-sensory activities that I asked my kiddo to use and play with after circle time while I help older kiddos. Cutie Pie takes turns playing with play-doh, block patterns, watercolors, and puzzles. It keeps her engaged and interested in learning. I laminated some of the shape block patterns from prekinders.com, and she loves following the patterns and playing with block patterns.
Decodable Readers to Launch them to Reading
For phonics, All About Reading is a great multi-sensory (hands-on and visual) learning program with lightly scripted lessons. It covers phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension. All About Reading has decodable readers that guide from letter sounds to CVC words, and to consonant teams, and a lot more.
Take a look at my other article on the full Kindergarten curriculum to guide you on how to homeschool kindergarten.
We used both All About Reading and the Good & the Beautiful. One would work well for one child, and the other will work better for another child. If you have a struggling child, All About Reading will work better, but if your child can quickly pick up her materials without a problem, the Good & the Beautiful would work well. Both programs have decodable readers.
Read Aloud to Them
Reading quality classic, living books become your shared experience with your child. Like a Jewish parent who continues to read scriptures even when a baby cannot smile, the books you read to them become delightful moments that you spend with your child, building character, empathy, and creativity.
Teachers will tell you to read 30 minutes every day, and it will increase kids’ attention span, and develop vocabulary, spelling, reading comprehension, empathy, and a lot more. Read-aloud has so many benefits that are beyond our thought. Below are some literature curricula and book list that you can look through.
- Five in a Row
Literature-based curriculum for 5-12-year-old with a unit study approach based on the book you are covering with your child - Read Aloud Revival with Sarah Mackenzie
Sarah, a homeschooling mama of six shares her wisdom and so many encouragements and guides you and your kids to fall in love with books. You can read Sarah Mackenzie’s book, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids, and you will not regret it! - Not Consumed Ministry Book List
Kim’s amazing Biblical-based book list for kids and even a decodable book list (Side note for tweens: Our kids enjoy Sugar Creek Gang and Price Warriors so much.) - Ambleside Online
Free Year K-12 Charlotte Mason homeschool curriculum with literature recommendations and references - Good and the Beautiful Book List
Conservative reading list that you can be trust
Add Physical Exercise/Movement
Please understand that the attention span of average kindergarteners is expected to be from 10-16 minutes (Brain Balance Achievement Centers). Give breaks often and give ample time to move their bodies. Simple 15 minutes of exercise in the morning will increase their heart rate and allow kids to focus and concentrate. You can spend 10 minutes of “teaching moment” instead of 30 minutes of divided attention!