Homeschool: Kindergarten End of Year

Our kindergarten year started in January 2020 and is about to end (December 2020). We went with Timberdoodle Curriculum again this year. I set certain expectations at the beginning of our year after going through all the items in our custom kit. So the big questions are: Did Timberdoodle deliver on their kindergarten curriculum? Do my child learn enough? Do I feel she has retained the information and is ready to move onto 1st Grade?

This school year was a bit rough. We took off about 3 months in the beginning of the year because of an extremely hard pregnancy. I was worried that by taking off so long that our daughter would forget most of what we went over. However, she remembered everything. I strongly believe it is due to Timberdoodle’s excellent choices in curriculum. The items we received are fun and engaging for kids. By having so many hands-on and interactive items it makes learning easy and our wanted to do school more than once a day. She’d constantly ask to do more school even if we already finished school for the day! For a 4 year old to want to do school instead of playing with toys or iPad is a huge example of how much fun Timberdoodle truly is for kids.

Do I feel our daughter has learned enough for kindergarten? Most definitely! She is on par with the 6-7 year olds in our homeschool group. And after looking up what school district goes over for kindergarten I realized our daughter learned a lot more than our local public school.

Do I feel she should move onto 1st grade work? Yes. She has mastered everything she needed for kindergarten. We recently went over all the reviews (I do one covering each 6 weeks) and she remembered everything. Even after taking off 3 months at the beginning of the year and 2 weeks off after my c-section. She is able to do all the goals I set at the beginning of the year. Some of the goals I had she surpassed. It’s an amazing feeling to know your child is learning and retaining the information needed. It’s all thanks to Timberdoodle for offering such a wonderful selection of curriculum.

Comments

Review: Geoboards

A fun way to help kids get great hand-eye coordination isn’t with Geoboards . I love that with these there are 4 boards included so you can use it with multiple students. The rubber bands are different colors and 2 different sizes. The pictures are fun, colorful and you get a bunch of them. My daughter really likes these. For some reason she thinks it’s so funny when the bands pop her. At first I just let her place the bands anywhere to get the idea of how to put them on. Then we started places them just on the white lines in the picture. She always wants to do more than one so I let her do as many pictures as she wants. I do wish there was a blanket picture so she could design her own things.

Tips & Tricks: Grading

When grading first thing you need to do is check your state laws on homeschool. Some states require you to keep record of your curriculum and and grading while some don’t. I do not have to keep any records or grading. Since I use Timberdoodle they have an awesome online scheduler that I use. It has all the curriculum that we use and in the check boxes I put the grades. At the end of each year I keep the scheduler pages so I have records. Below is how I grade things. I also do not show our daughter the grades or tell her them. I don’t want her to worry about getting a bad grade. When she’s in middle school and high school grades that’s when I’ll start letting her know about grade. My grading system: Pre-K - 2 Grade: she will not see the grade E: excellent; no extra work needed; 100-90% S: satisfactory; give a little extra work; 89-80% N: needs improvement; give a lot of extra work; 79-0% 3 - 5 Grade: she will only see letter grade if she wants to know her grade A: 100-90%

Tips & Tricks: Class Schedule

How do you make a class schedule? When do you do which subjects? How long do you do a class? Does each day look the same? It is easy to make a homeschool schedule since you can school however you like. Since we use Timberdoodle we have access to their online schedule which over the years has been updated to be an outstanding way to schedule our subjects. If you do not use Timberdoodle I would suggest using Excel. If you know a website that allows you to create a schedule (for free) then let me know in the comments. The first thing I do make our schedule is make a list of all of our items and mark which ones I think will be challenging and which will be easy. Core subjects would be harder than things like STEM and thinking skills. Then I use that list to make another list on what day we will do each item. Making sure that not one day will be to hard or to easy. I like it to be pretty even as well as each day having about the same number of items. Some subjects we do everyday those are E

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