I have a friend who is beginning her HS adventure this year. Her kids are of Kindergarden age, and she's looking for a curriculum that is organized, and easy to follow along with. She's a "check things off as you go" type of gal. Any recommendations? This is actually good info for me to as I will be starting in the next couple years.
I really, really like Hubbard's Cupboard online for free. There are pdf's to save and print, and several different "levels" that are all options for this age group in my mind. Personally, we use some letter activities (see Letter Of the Week dot-com, Starfall, etc) plus Math-U-See Primer. Other than that, I'm not really all about buying a curric for K, but so many people are. Some of the ones I do like and would find fun if I just had money to blow include My Father's World and Winter's Promise.
I am brand spanking new so my opinions are near worthless, but I am in love with Hubbard's Cupboard as Dalynnrmc suggested! I started looking at it this week (lol I meant it when I said new!) and I have read the lesson plans for the 2's and 3's and I think they are fantastic so if the K is anything like the preschool stuff then I bet it's great! got our seashells today!
I have gone back and forth on this so many times! DD turns 5 this summer, so would technically start K in Sept. We are working on CLE Learning to Read right now. She is just over half done. I'm planning to start Sonlight P4/5 when she finishes the LTR. I haven't decided on Math yet. I'm debating between CLE, Horizons, Singapore, and MUS.
I tried My Father's World kindy with my oldest and I loved the concept and it's very much a check everything off the list kind of curriculum. We dropped it after a few weeks because it was a lot of learning to read and my oldest was already a solid reader. I've heard rave reviews about the Heart of Dakota curriculum from Kindy up. I was tempted to try it out this year for my 2nd son. But instead I am doing K4 from Erica at confessionsofahomeschooler.com with him. We started two weeks ago and things are going great. We'll do a few more weeks while my oldest finishes first grade and pick up where we leave off in the fall. He was just ready for more school so I indulged him. It's a lot of printing. I'm printing off all the worksheets and putting each week of pages in page protectors and in folders with the three prongs on the middle. Then he uses a dry erase marker and wipe it clean at the end. This way I can just pull it out and use it again when it's my next son's turn and then my daughter and so on. I love it because it has worksheets and hands on games and activities which he really seems to need for his learning style. The only thing I'm adding to it is reading easy readers from the library together. We also have her pre-k Letter Of The Week stuff all printed out and laminated and use that as a basis for our preschool schooling. I like that the letter themes coordinate through so it seems familiar to them while they are learning new things.
I found the following useful stuff. Phonics: http://www.progressivephonics.com/ I found this reading list really helpful. http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs.../18/classical-school-reading-list-grades-1-8/
Something else we did for the pK/K years was thematic unit studies. I did all kinds of searches, and kindy teachers are AWESOME about posting entire units and what they use online. I'll have to look up the calendar math site, and a couple of the fun teacher sites we used. We pretty much just did these on an interest-led basis, in addition to the phonics and math (which IMHO - see my sig line there LOL - is all you really need at this age). I'll go find some. After dinner.
Mrs. Meach's calendar math! She has upgraded her site and done tons and tons. There's a wealth of ideas here and a ton of ways to use what she has! We did a wall calendar plus they kept their own notebook calendars with a lot of the activities she suggests. AWESOME!
I am currently using My Father's World for K and we enjoy it. It is definitely all set u[ for you and they add in extras that you can do. We like it but this is my first HS experience so I have no basis of comparison either.
