When my oldest was age 5, I came across an amazing curriculum plan from A Humble Place. I wasn’t sure what I going to plan for my son’s kindergarten year because every curriculum I was looking at didn’t seem to be a good fit. But when I came across her plans I knew it was just what I had been looking for. Part of the reason we chose to do A Humble Place’s Kindergarten Curriculum is because it is easy to follow, it will be a good transition into Ambleside Online for the year after and it is in line with a Charlotte Mason education. I made a few tweaks to AHP based on what resources I already owned and what was the best fit for our family so I wanted to share here a full picture of our Kindergarten plans!
HISTORY:
We’re following AHP’s history and reading Fifty Famous People throughout the year.
GEOGRAPHY:
My friend Lindsay at Little School of Smith’s has created a wonderful blueprint lessons for studying geography using Me on the Map. Each month we will read a few themed books, do a few activities and then a field trip inspired by our home, street, city, state, country, continent and planet. This includes helping our neighbors, visiting local bakeries, trails, parks, coffee shops, museums, lakes and beaches! The last few years I’ve been intentional about doing seasonal and local activities and this was a great way to tie in some of those things we have loved so much as well.
We also will be reading Children Just Like Me on the opposite weeks as we learn more about children around the world. I’m using the older version of the book since we already had that on hand.
NATURE STUDY:
For nature study we are reading Seed Babies, Mother West Wind’s Children and Thornton Burgess’s Bedtime Stories, since the last two were books we already had on hand and similar to the planned Old Mother West Wind (same author, some cross over stories and characters).
SCIENCE:
One of the main things we’ve studied as a family and have really enjoyed is birds. It was important to my son that we continue to identify, study and log different birds, so we will be doing that in the fall using many various resources (The Bird Songs Bible being our favorite), and then in the spring we will be studying flowers and trees. We’ll start with just the flowers and trees that bloom in our yard and go from there. In the winter, we will be doing experiments from Science in Seconds!
LITERATURE:
A Humble Place has great selections of Pooh, Beatrix Potter and The Children’s Treasury of Virtues already worked into the curriculum. Additionally, we like reading chapter books at night together, so we will be reading through Homer Price, The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, Tumtum and Nutmeg, My Father’s Dragon, Elmer and the Dragon, The Dragons of Blueland and Paddington books. After each book, we will do a few special activities to celebrate! We will likely be working in a few more chapter books via audiobook on our travels throughout the school year, and then of course, many picture books via the library!
POETRY:
For poetry, I decided we will focus on one poem for each set of six weeks to memorize. We will recite this as part of our morning time every morning. We will also continue reading poetry during tea times, and are using “I am the Seed that Grew the Tree” and “When We Were Very Young” to read various poems as these were already books we had on hand.
MATH:
We already own and have dabbled in the Math-U-See Primer, so we will continue on with this and then will follow that with Ray’s New Primary Arithmetic book, as needed. I’m not sure exactly where my son is at with math or what is going to connect with him most, so we’ll take it slow and try a few different approaches and see what lands!
ARTIST STUDY:
We’re studying Rembrandt and DaVinci next year, with every other week during tea time, studying a new piece of their artwork and reading a go-along picture book about the artists life. We’re hoping to also tour our local art museum and see some of their works on display!
COMPOSER STUDY:
We’re studying Mozart and Handel next year, and will be listening to one of their famous compositions on the opposite week of the artist study. We also are reading go-along picture books about their lives and will be listening to Classics for Kids productions about their works, watching a documentary on Amazon Prime, listening to Classical Kids radio drama and watching a few youtube videos that give kid-friendly overviews on each composer.
HYMN STUDY:
We will again this school year be studying one hymn per month, singing it together during morning time, and at the beginning of each month reading it’s backstory in Then Sings My Soul or Living Stories of Famous Hymns. We use the “morning menu” idea of keeping all of our memory verses, poetry, daily schedule and monthly hymn all in a clear menu holder for easy access and reading at the breakfast table!
BIBLE:
We will continue to work through A Child’s Story Bible (we’re about a quarter of the way through), and then we will read The Jesus Storybook Bible followed by Leading Little Ones to God, if needed. The plan is to read through one story a day in conjunction with our morning time. We are also focusing on one memory passage every month to recite together! In the past we’ve done a verse per week but I wanted to memorize longer passages together this year.
HANDICRAFTS:
I wanted to focus on three main handicrafts: cooking/baking, drawing and weaving. For cooking and baking we will be making recipes from Pooh’s Cookbook (usually before we read a chapter from Pooh or before our weekly tea time), or Pretend Soup and Other Recipes, which my daughter got for Christmas. Both of my older kids love to work in the kitchen so I think it’ll help them build some real skills and be fun to do together. We will be working on drawing from the Draw Write Now book and from Draw 50 Birds, Draw 50 Flowers, and Draw 50 Animals. I’m hoping this will set my oldest up better for nature journaling in the future, and some weeks we will tie this in with our bird/flower/tree study. My son has expressed interest in weaving a bunch, so we will be working on some small weaving projects (like pot holders and nature weaving) and then will hopefully work up to larger projects!
READING:
We will be doing some reading lessons from our Discover Reading curriculum, still casually working on sight words and reading Bob Books. I’m not pushing reading lessons but following my 5 year old's lead!
COPYWORK/WRITING:
We will work on writing out our memory passages, poems and favorite quotes from our reading. All of these I will save along with favorite drawings, etc. in a hardback bound sketchbook so I can have a keepsake of all the work he completes throughout the year!
All in all, I spent less than $100 on all the materials and supplies for the year, that I didn’t already have, and many I could have found at the library or substituted for less expensive or free alternatives (like kindle or audiobook versions).
I really loved how A Humble Place laid out all of the readings and activities so I could get a fuller picture of how often to do a subject/how to fit it all together. I put our entire schedule into a week-at-a-glance schedule, so I could get a birds-eye view on how much each week contained. We plan to do 36 weeks, with a break week after each set of 6. We will start in August and end in late May.
Our Monday-Thursday daily schedule will include morning time (prayer, bible reading, memory work passage recitation, hymn study, poetry recitation, doxology), copywork or reading lesson, math and then 2-3 other readings or activities which varies between: history, science, nature study, geography, literature, tea time, artist study, composer study, handicraft.
Fridays will include morning time, a seasonal activity/field trip and catching up on any materials we missed or wanted to linger in. I’m planning on the whole “school day” taking around 1 hour, so leaving lots of time for playing outside, going on walks, playing with legos and being together as a family!