I had heard that a stay at home mom, when she just does her normal thing (read aloud to the kids, talk about letters as you can) will have her kids ready for kindergarden or beginning reading. I didn't think it could quite be right.... but I have been gladly surprised.
So far in my investigations into homeschool curriculums, I think I'm most interested in using My Father's World (largely a Charlotte Mason approach, but with terrible artistry) and Veritas Press (which seems to me to be the best of the best of the Classical Educational style- looks especially good for older kids and has masterpiece artwork from K on up) and then also Singapore Math. I'm really excited about and content to see these products and curricula on our horizon.
Anyway... I ordered the Veritas Press Museum Combo Kit for K - 1st grade. It's beautiful. Artwork all spectacular (really important for our artistic boy) and obviously all high quality stuff but hte problem is we just didn't need it. I wouldn't recommend any mom like me to get this.
We could have skipped it altogether (and it wasn't cheap! would have been nice to save that $220!!) and just continued with the Leap Frog Letter Factory DVD, Word Factory (we don't watch TV or many DVDs but these two are so helpful for when we need that kind of break) then with the starfall website and ABCya website educational games and with the simple reading, sounding out words that we do.... I think we could have skipped the entire K year of this Veritas Press kit at least. Still, it will be fun to play around with some of the beautiful worksheets and the paper dolls and doll-house style Museum where the kids can hang art- a masterpiece for every letter in the alphabet. Much of it is very clever (though I'm not a fan of the music CD.)
If I could go back, I would maybe have bought the Delightful Reading kit at Simply Charlotte Mason.org. It's about $50 and looks excellent too. Most importantly, this short series of articles for teaching kids to read (this is the way to go folks- excellent ways to engage kids with letters- and free!) plus the few things I mentioned above (DVDs we already have and websites we already use) would have maybe been all we needed.... oh well. We've got 4 kids to use this kit on and I think it will be fun to play around a bit more with the letters they already know.
Singapore Math. I was a bit intimidated when a friend told me that her daughter (one month older than Isaiah) has already gotten into the Earlybird Activity book A. But when it arrived I realized.... it's basically just a glorified activity workbook. Grandma has loaded us with dozens of educational workbooks to play with and this first level textbook is basically just a pretty step up of that same material. Again... we could have skipped it. I think we'll be passing level B and I'll look more carefully at what material is covered in the next level up.
To sum it up... perhaps I should have paid a LOT more attention to the few people who told me that Kindergarten doesn't need to be taken too seriously. Glad I didn't get any more materials than this!
Since our kids are in morning Chinese preschool, I was only planning on doing a bit of math and teaching reading this year. This morning Isaiah's homework for preschool was to mark which animals have living births and which lay eggs.... higher level science than I remember studying anytime before junior high school!
