A few months ago, I shared about my frustrations with Kindergarten. You can read all about it here but in summary, it wasn’t going well. I was feeling like a failure and my kindergartener was less than pleased with how we were approaching things. School should not be a negative thing when you are five years old. It shouldn’t even be a negative thing when you are fifteen, or twenty-five, or fifty-five. Learning should always be a source of joy.
But it wasn’t. Kindergarten was feeling like a disaster. It felt that way for the entire first semester. But thank God for Christmas break because my brain was able to get some true rest and reset and think clearly instead of feeling so defeated that I couldn’t even come up with a plan.
I remembered the number one rule of Classical Conversations: KEEP IT STICK IN THE SAND. What does that mean? Keep it simple, Momma. Keep it simple. Kindergarten (and pretty much every other grade) goes a lot more smoothly with less props, less fancy manipulatives, less expensive curriculum. Kindergarten should be about learning to use those little fingers, identifying letters and numbers, and basic math skills. He also listens to the Foundations memory work with the rest of us and participates in our morning basket time that we do as a family–we cover everything from art to math drills to microscope usage during that short time each morning.
So I took it back to basics. We are continuing with Math U See Primer because he is absolutely rocking it and it is a great fit for him. Not all math curriculum fits all math students, so I am feeling lucky that we got it right on the first try with this kid.
We also use Addition Facts That Stick to review the math facts that he is learning in Math U See. Again, we hit math hard because he truly enjoys it. Using an additional math book may not be appropriate for some kids but for him, it works. We really like the penny flip game that practices adding 1 and 2 to numbers. We play it multiple times a day! All you need to play is a drawing of two rows of ten squares, two buttons and a penny. That’s pretty “stick in the sand”!
The only other official curriculum that we are working with is A Reason for Handwriting. I like that every other page is a coloring page and I like that the method they use for teaching handwriting. He seems to like it, although he doesn’t really enjoy letters at all.
Past that, I’ve got some super simple tools that we are using for letter recognition. My kindergarten is having a lot of trouble with letter recognition. I really believe it has to do with all his medical trauma, all the tests, all the doctors, all the appointments. For whatever reason, all that anxiety bubbles up when it’s time to learn letters. So we are taking a very, very simple route to learning letters. It’s slow going and we aren’t getting there as quickly as I’d like. But he is making progress and I can’t ask for much more than that.
First, I found these alphabet blocks at the dollar store. They are super lightweight, and they were only a dollar. There’s plenty of better quality blocks out there but what I like about these is that there are only 9 but that’s enough space to have every letter and 0-9 printed on a side. Actually, there are also math symbols and punctuation marks so I think I must be missing one of the blocks. Ha! Anyway, for a dollar, these can’t be beat. We roll them like dice and whichever letter shows up on top, he has to try to remember the name of. If he can’t, we roll that block again. It only has six sides so eventually, he either rolls something he knows, or he repeats one he had before and remembers this time. He likes it, it only takes a few minutes, and he doesn’t complain about it. Win. Win. Win.
Our other stick in the sand letter recognition game is made with a stack of 3×5 cards and a pencil. Cards = sand and pencil = stick. We’ve got this. So I cute the cards in half, and I wrote a letter on each one. We started with 4 letters and I think I did each one twice, in upper and lowercase, so 4 cards total per letter. And then I added 4 cards with silly faces on them. I punched a hole in the corner and put them on a ring to keep them together (you could also just use a sandwich bag, I happened to have rings in my supplies).
How to play? I flip a card over and he says which letter it is. Then he flips one over and I say what letter it is–this way he’s also hearing me say correct answers, which gives him more exposure. And those silly faces? When we flip a silly face card, we meow! You could make whatever sound you want. You could roar like a dinosaur, bark like a dog, fake sneeze, whatever makes your kid giggle. My boy likes cats, so we meow. So he is always hoping to get a silly face card instead of a letter, and that keeps him engaged in the game. It’s so simple and it’s working! I add two new letters every few weeks, as he gets bored and seems to be mastering what he already has.
Finally, we are working on using those fingers. I read an article about how there is an impending shortage of surgeons in this country because kids are so used to swiping a screen instead of using their hands that there will be no kids left who have the dexterity to operate! How crazy and sad is that?!?
I hit the Kumon offerings pretty hard for this. We did this maze book, which he finished quickly and is begging for the next one. The mazes get increasingly difficult and require more focus and hand control as you go through the book. We are also working on cutting and gluing with this book. And then we are working on folding skills with this workbook. And the great thing is that the paper is nice and thick and easy to hold while you work. You could definitely just print your own things, but I do like the quality of the paper and the way it slowly builds to more difficult skills throughout the book. It isn’t as stick in the sand as drawing a shape on a scrap of paper and having them cut it out, but it’s also not super expensive and the books make him smile. And learning should make kids smile, right?!?
And then, I tuck it all inside a simple 12×12 scrapbooking case I bought at Michaels’ when it was on sale. Normally they are $10 each, but they often go on sale for 3/$10 and that is when I buy them! You can see what they look like on Amazon, but they are far cheaper at the craft store. The only thing I can’t fit in the box is his Math U See blocks, but they have their own carrying case, so it’s fine. I also keep a whiteboard, dry erase marker, pencils, scissors, and a glue stick in the box so everything we need is right there waiting.
We sit down on my bed and open up the box and take everything out. We do one activity from each thing in the box (one page of each workbook, one round of each game). We put each thing back in the box as we finish and when everything is back in the box, he is DONE with school for the day. Or so he thinks. Playing is learning and so he’s really still doing school when he plays with his toys. He just doesn’t know it.
Please don’t tell him.