Today I’m sharing my homeschool curriculum choices for kindergarten for the 2024-2025 school year!
I’ve been homeschooling for 14 years. This upcoming year, my last child will enter kindergarten. It is a bittersweet thing for me. Kindergarten is such a sweet year with my kids. They love to sit and snuggle on the couch, reading all sorts of good books. They are so excited to be doing school and look forward to it every day.
Since I first started my homeschool journey, my methods have changed quite a bit. At the beginning I was set in a public school mindset. I followed the teacher’s guide to a T, making sure to check every box and fill every hole.
Since I have relaxed a lot since then, kindergarten is much more enjoyable than it used to be. Having 7 more children than I did all those years ago, my time is also much more limited. I now have a very minimalist approach to kindergarten and like to keep it simple. While kids are excited to “do school” when they are little, they don’t learn only from the books. Living life can teach them so many things!
Math
Our family has used Masterbook’s Math Lessons For a Living Education for many years. It was a game changer for our homeschool. My oldest son battled math everyday with lots of tears. When we switched to Masterbooks for our math curriculum, all of those tears disappeared! It is such a sweet and gentle, yet thorough curriculum.
My kindergartener will be using Math Lessons for a Living Education level K for his beginning math. The lessons are short and fun. He has already started and begs me to do more than one lesson each day. This has been the case for all of my kids who have used it. Most likely he will finish it before the end of the year and then we will start level 1.
Phonics and Reading
My approach to teaching reading has drastically changed since I first started teaching my kids to read. While my oldest daughter started reading when she was 4, my second child, a boy, did not start reading until he was 9 or 10 years old. I have learned that each child is so different. I have also learned that it is generally better to wait until my kids are a little older before I start teaching them any formal reading lessons.
Simply K from Masterbooks is a unique program that has a development approach to learning. It is such a fun way to learn!
It is scheduled for 3 days a week and includes lessons for Bible, rhyme time (letter recognition, vocab words, and poetry), life skills, and the ABCs.
Simply K peaked my interest because it is an all-in-one book. I can add to it if I want to and we have time, or we can simply follow the lesson and know that he is getting a great education. Although I’ve never used Simply K before I wanted to give it a go this year. I love everything Masterbooks and we have been using their curriculum for several years.
Normally I would order the pdf version of the workbooks I order from them, but because this year is my last year to teach kindergarten, I went ahead and got the physical book. Their books are such great quality for the price. Masterbooks is one of the most affordable curriculums I have seen and the quality of their books can’t be beat.
Everything Else
From the very beginning of my homeschool I have taught history and science family style. Even when I had only 2 kids I would prop my toddler up to the table so he could listen while I read aloud to my oldest daughter. As we added more kids to our family, they were taught to sit at the table with us and do school.
This year I will be using My Father’s World Adventures to teach my kindergartner history along with several of his older siblings. We will be using only the history portion along with the student sheets. We will also memorize that list of scriptures they have planned in the teacher’s guide. I have used this curriculum before (12 years ago!) and love it so much. For years I have held onto it waiting for the perfect time to use it again and this is the year! My version is a little different than the one available now but not by a lot. I’m so excited and can’t wait to get started!
For science we will begin the year with a bird study. The books I’m going to use for that are God’s Big Book of Animals and Marvels of Creation – Breath Taking Birds from Masterbooks, Traveling with the Birds, and The Adventures of Bob White by Thornton Burgess. Traveling with the Birds is a beautiful old book that I recently found at a flea market while on vacation in Branson. To go along with this study I printed some notebooking pages from notebooking pages.com and made each child a bird study notebook. My plan is to work our way through each book until we are done. Once we finish the bird study we will move onto something else… most likely dinosaurs!
We will also be using God’s Story from Masterbooks and Jesus Strong and Kind by Sinclair Ferguson for Bible. These two books may not take us all year to read. If we finish them and need to add more we will begin reading The Ology by Marty Machowski.
Homeschool Co-op
Last year our family participated in a homeschool co-op for the first time. It was very different for us and took a bit to get used to. But we enjoyed it so much and will be doing it again this year.
The K-2nd grade class will have 3 different classes for the fall and spring semester. For the fall they will enjoy story time using Five in a Row curriculum (I get to teach!), Anatomy and PE. In the spring, they will continue with story time and anatomy but the third class still to be determined.
While I am a little sad that this year will be my last year teaching kindergarten, I am also very excited to start off this school year. I hope you enjoyed seeing my homeschool curriculum choices for kindergarten for the 2024-2025 school year. Let me know in the comments what ages your kids are and what curriculum you are planning to you!
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