You don’t need curriculum or expensive manipulatives. Laugh together! Bake together! Count the steps at the park and talk about colors on your walk. Put the worksheets away and instead cuddle up together and read books (did you know that hugging your child actually increases his intelligence?). Why would we want to remove the fun of learning? But why would I do that if the dishes were getting cleaned? Children are naturally joyful and playful - let’s encourage that and use it to our advantage. When my kids are happily playing with soap bubbles as they wash dishes, I could yell at them and force them to stop being playful. It’s not that you (as the teacher/mother) need to make learning fun. I completely recommend it as a preschool math curriculum, or for a child you are not sure is ready for kindergarten even though they are turning five.Kindergarten math should be all about playing. Like the recommendations I read, it really is very easy for kindergarten. If you get the manipulative kit (which I really recommend!) your child will have fun playing learning with pattern blocks, linking cubes, dominoes, teddy bear counters, geo boards, and more! Every lesson my kids ask to play with the manipulatives after the lesson is over. I was getting burned out planning all of our lessons (which I love to do, but there are only so many hours in the day), so I love being able to just glance at the lessons and grab the needed manipulatives right before we start. Everything is done with manipulatives, which I love! The lessons are scripted, which is a very welcomed break for me. There are no worksheets, no written work at all for your child. If this is your child’s first experience with math concepts, one a day (like it is written for) would be great. The lessons are short and very basic, so sometimes we do two in a day. Next, each lesson is followed with new teaching material. It practices counting skills (up to 31 which is helpful for my daughter), reading skills, patterns (each month has a new pattern to color in the dates with), and obviously calendar skills (days of the week, months of the year, etc.) When my son was three, I purposefully taught him these things, but I realized that I just hadn’t thought to do it with my daughter, so this is a really great teaching tool for her and great reinforcement time for my son. Basically we add a new date to the calendar and learn about new information on a calendar. Each lesson starts with the Meeting Book. The kids were thrilled when the box with all the manipulatives came in the mail, and we have all loved the fun, simple lessons. They said that the kindergarten curriculum was more on the preschool level, but because I wanted to use it with both my three and five-year-old, I thought it would be just right for us. We are still using Ray’s a couple days a week, but I wanted to incorporate something that would also provide practice in some classic kindergarten type skills (patterns, basic measuring, calendar reading, etc.) What about Kindergarten Saxon math?Īfter consulting a few classical homeschooling references, I decided to give Saxon a try. We have been using Ray’s Arithmetic and it has provided my son with a fantastic understanding of how addition and subtraction works. I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old and at the turn of the year I was feeling like I wanted to change up our math routine a bit.
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