Our Kindergarten Homeschool Routine and Curriculum

We’re a month into our first year of homeschooling now, and after making a few shifts and really finding our groove, I’m thrilled with how our curriculum picks are working out and how our weekly/daily routines are falling into place.

I knew we wouldn’t fully know how everything would work for us until we really got into each subject, but after spending months researching different options back in the spring (I gave myself a deadline to purchase curriculum by June 1st so I wouldn’t be overthinking it all summer), I’m pretty happy overall with what we landed on. I’ve been able to quickly figure out where we’re lacking, how we can supplement, and how to structure our weeks to be most efficient and not bog our days down with schoolwork – because isn’t that the whole point?!

Below, I’ll share about each of our picks, what I like about it, and how we’re fitting it all into our weeks.

Kindergarten Curriculum Choices | Core Subjects

The Good and The Beautiful Language Arts | Steele completed TGATB Kinder Prep last year, and we like a lot about it – it really is beautiful and the illustrations are engaging, it has an app with bonus materials, and the short and sweet lessons get right to the point. TGABT Language Arts Level K emphasizes discussion and storytelling and overall, it’s fun for her. There’s no busy work and no prep work required. It’s a popular choice, but I agree with critiques about TGABT being “wide, not deep” and I do feel like it lacks depth in certain areas. A lot of lessons feel too short and random/disconnected, especially when it comes to spelling and writing (which is where our next pick comes in!). I’m not sure we’ll stick with TGABT Language Arts beyond first grade — I’m just not sure it’s substantive enough — but for now, we like it.

Handwriting Without Tears | We’re loving the Level K Handwriting program! We also got a student license for Keys for Me, their beginner computer skills course, and have been very impressed with both. I love that everything is so cohesive across their courses – I ended up also getting their Building Writers workbook that combines handwriting practice with an intro to creative writing (narrative, opinion and informative), which has been a great way to supplement TGABT Language Arts.

Singapore Math | A huge YES for us! This program is unique in so many ways and has tons of research to support its methods. Steele had a strong grasp on lots of math concepts (seriously, get your toddlers watching Numberblocks and prepare to be amazed) and I was hopeful this curriculum would keep her challenged and strengthen her number sense, visualization and pattern recognition, mental math, critical thinking, and creative problem solving skills. It has absolutely exceeded my expectations on all counts! We’re finishing up KA/KB (lots of wonderful lessons I didn’t want to skip!) and we’re excited to settle in with the Grade 1 set. This one’s a definite win and we haven’t looked back!

Answers Bible Lessons | This ended up not being a good fit for us, unfortunately. It was our only flop! We got the K1 workbook and teacher’s guide and after just a few lessons, I decided to nix it and move on. It’s just very… dense. Not engaging or age-appropriate in my opinion and Steele was quickly losing interest. So for now, we’re focusing on The Ology and our devotionals (below), which have been wonderful, and I’m on the hunt for another Bible curriculum. I’m intrigued by Driven by Grace Foundations. TBD if we decide to incorporate that this year or not!

Supplemental Curriculum

The Ology | More here! A beautiful book, and its Truths and discussion questions are helping us build a great foundation before we dive into another Bible curriculum.

Indescribable: Devotions About God + Science | More here! We’re enjoying these — quick, interesting, thought-provoking, good conversation starters — and will continue on with the others in the series, How Great is Our God/The Wonder of Creation.

The Good and The Beautiful Science | TGATB has five overarching science units for PK-2, all of which can be taught in any order and adapted for multiple ages, so the boys can participate too! We started with Fields + Flowers and quickly realized we wanted to go ahead and add a few of their other units to mix up our subject matter, so we got Wind + Waves, Sparks + Stars, and Nests + Burrows. These lessons are quick, minimal prep if any, engaging, age-appropriate and creative. We love it!

Beginning Geography | An intro to maps, landforms, bodies of water, continents and oceans – more here. We’re liking this so far and I think it’s been a worthy addition, even though TGABT Language Arts does cover basic geography concepts.

Exploring Nature | Simple activities we can do right around our house – more here. Several are climate/location dependent, but we’ll get at least a dozen good activities out of this book.

Brighter Day Press Seasonal + Holiday Studies | We got the Labor Day, Autumn, Thanksgiving, and Advent studies to help fill our fall semester. We’ve enjoyed these even more than I expected! They’ve been a great way to round out each week with fun, enriching activities and they’re easy to do with multiple children/ages.

Deep Space Sparkle Art Projects | I just happened upon this website when searching for kindergarten art projects and I’m so thankful. These art lessons/projects are very doable, organized by grade level and are designed to teach art skills in an intentional way. We’ve had so much fun with these!

We’ll rotate between Art, Nature, and Music lessons every Friday, so I knew I just needed about 12 lessons each to get us through the year. Not using anything specific for Music – there are so many great YouTube classes for this age and I plan to have her do 2 lessons each on beat, rhythm, pitch, tempo, volume, and instrument exploration.

Our Weekly Homeschool Routine for Kinder

One theme I kept seeing as I was thinking about how to structure our days: you’re not trying to replicate a public school classroom at home. I wanted to intentionally leave room for play, rest, outings and activities throughout our weeks. It took us a little bit to figure out how often to do our supplemental subjects, factoring in things like dance practice, the boys going to preschool two days and being home with us the other three, wanting to spread out our writing-heavy days, and keeping plenty of time for play and rest, but we’ve landed on a great routine that works well for all of us. Most days we are done with our work by lunchtime.

There are a lot of physical homeschool planners out there, but I prefer something digital so I can easily edit/move things around. I made this simple template on Google Docs that I’ll just copy from week to week and fill in details where needed. We print each week out and check things off as we go, but for the most part I let her pick the order of our subjects each day and if something comes up and we need to save anything for another day, it’s not a big deal. Here’s what our typical week looks like!

Our morning routine includes practicing writing the day and date, writing her memory verse of the week, chatting about the weather, and saying the pledge. A couple times throughout the week we’ll do a quick journal prompt, practice our emotional vocabulary by talking about recent highs and lows, practice calendar skills, and listen to kids’ songs + hymns.

As for the boys – they are newly four and still two years away from official kindergarten age, so I’m not pushing them to do any schoolwork at this point. They are getting plenty of learning in at MDO right now, but they do love to be included and both love to “do school” too, so I got these preschool workbooks for them (thank you Larson for the rec!) and we always encourage them to join us for our morning routine, devotionals, seasonal study, nature, art, music and science lessons as those aren’t really age-specific. Otherwise, they can play outside or independently while we do our other lessons. It’s not always calm or quiet and we’re all learning to adapt to the chaos – if we all need a break, we play! If we need to chill out, we read. If we need to head to the park, we go.

I’m not aiming for a specific number of days for our school year – we started the last week of August and I want to be finished by mid-May at the latest, with plenty of breaks and hopefully some travels in there too! Most of our curriculum is intended to fit a typical school year but we’re just going at a pace that feels right, going on to the next level if we get there, slowing down if we need to, and seeing where we end up.

Future Curriculum Picks

A lot of homeschool curriculum options don’t really “start” until the first grade level (or their offerings expand a lot after Kinder). Always keeping an open mind and not holding tightly to any plans, but these are the ones I would add to our lineup for first grade and up!

Singapore Math Sprints (speed drills for 1st grade/up)
180 Days of Spelling + Word Study (1st grade/up)
BJU Press Writing + Grammar (2nd grade/up)
Notgrass 50 States (1st/2nd grade)
Notgrass Star Spangled Story American History (3rd grade/up)
Handwriting Without Tears Cursive (2nd grade/up)
Learning Without Tears Building Writers (1st grade/up)
The Good and The Beautiful Science, History, Creative Writing, Music Appreciation (3rd grade/up)
World Watch News (3rd grade/up)
Driven by Grace Foundations of the Bible (multi-age)

on my no list

When I was beginning my research, I so wished there was someone out there who shared my mindset/values who could just say “These aren’t what you want” and save me the trouble and TIME of looking into those options. I won’t go into why for each one of these, but for what it’s worth, here are the homeschool curriculum companies that ended up on my no list for one reason or another. Too dull, too much busy work, not enough depth, just not our style… it’s all highly subjective, of course — lots of these are very popular, just not ones I’d buy for us.

Abeka
Pandia Press
My Father’s World
Blossom and Root
Oak Meadow
Saxon
Sonlight
Classical Academic Press
Christian Light Education

Truly though, each family is different and each child has a different learning style, so it’s worth exploring all the options. No curriculum is perfect, no single program will cover every single thing you’re wanting or needing – but that’s the beauty of getting to custom-tailor things. You can piece together a plan that works beautifully!