Yesterday I attended the Southwest Missouri Home Education Convention. Each hour there were several different workshops to choose from. I attended Three Simple Goals for the First Year and Kindergarten 101: The Three R's and a little bit more. One of the main things that I took from it is that homeschooling the first year really is more about the mom then the child. This first year was really a time for me to test myself and see if homeschooling would really work for us. There were points where I wondered if I would be disciplined or structured enough in the home environment. As this school year is starting to wrap up, I am so proud of Lily's progress and also so proud of myself for really instilling in Lily a love for learning.
Lily was 4 years and 2 months when this school year started. I decided that we would call this year kindergarten even though she was still too young by public school standards. She already was writing her name and all of her letters (although not all of them correctly). She also was counting and knew her letter sounds.
I started the year with a themed unit approach. I wanted to really make sure that learning was fun. We would do a theme each month and bring all of her lessons around that theme. This was a lot of fun. We did an apple theme, a Fall/leaves theme, a pumpkin/Halloween theme, a Valentine's theme, and a St. Patrick's Day theme. We also had some small themes like community helpers and snow. As I started on different curriculum, sometimes we did take breaks from our themes.
At the beginning of the year, I focused on simple sight words and sight word books with Lily. She really picked up on it quickly. Through her reading, she learned about finger spaces and punctuation. This all carried over into her writing.
Starting in Jan. we moved on to doing Hooked on Phonics and it really is a great program. Lily is reading so well and so independently. I can't believe that she is reading at a beginning of first grade level and she isn't even 5 years old yet. That has been our biggest success. Also the fact that Lily begs to read with us and to do school work is a great sign that I am instilling that love for learning in her. :)
Writing is a harder area for Lily. She is left handed and so sometimes I think her brain works backwards in writing, but her print is getting much more clear. She is also writing one to two sentences every time she writes in her journal. She writes independently which is wonderful. However, if I am not right next to her, she will start writing faster and less legibly. She also mastered writing her whole name now. She writes Lily Peters on all of her papers. It is so cute!
In Math, she is counting to 100 and counting by 10's. She also knows her months of the year and days of the week. She mastered that very early in the year. She knows all of the shapes that I have taught her including 3-dimensional shapes such as the cylinder and rectangular prism.
I really am so proud of her. Lily is such a quick learner and really loves it. She is constantly trying to discover knew things! I have already been picking out different curriculum for her first grade year of school. I am also going to continue with some thematic units.
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