Are you looking for simple low-prep home school ideas for your kindergarten student? Are you new to home schooling? Then, you will love Home School Seasons and Spring unit! This unit is perfect for parents working at home. The lessons for reading and math are about an hour each. There are also extra printables that are great for fillers and children that want more.
This week was literally a scramble. We ended our Florida vacation early and drove home, rather then our plan to fly, to prevent exposure. All the way home I wondered how I would not only work from home, but how I would home school a 4th grade and kindergartner. The teachers sent home some amazing resources and activities, but I wanted to make sure that they were still getting some of the structure from school, to make transition back easier.
Organization and Planning Tools:
I included a few sample schedules. The time schedule is mostly for me. We never start by 9, but I like the idea of a plan. Our family has a goal of one hour of literacy activities, 1 hour of math, 1-3 hours of outside time over the course of the day, and 1 hour of no technology family time. My husband and I both have to work from home, so we may do literacy in the morning and then math in the afternoon. The lessons and activities are all important concepts, but kids quickly pick them up with the activities.
Why Calendar Time?
Believe it or not we start our day with the calendar. The first reason we do it, is to make sure we actually know what day it is, it is so easy to lose track. There are so many math skills built into calendar time, it’s like a bonus math class. We sing Days of the Week by Dr. Jean, and look at each day. We also count how many days we have had in the month and then follow the number up to find whether it’s Monday or Tuesday etc. We have also been writing the date on a little white board (like 3/12/20) to use later when we are writing. Some days we spent a lot of time on the calendar, other days we run through it quickly. It is just a part of the routine. You may have a different way to do calendar, but calendar in general should be added to your home school ideas.
Day 1: Opinion Writing and Number Recognition and Writing
Going from mom to teacher is crazy for your child. For the first activity we read the book The Tiny Seed (link to book and video are in the packet) by Eric Carle. We not only discussed the four season, you can watch how out of 10 seeds, only one seed makes it in the end. So as we read I drew 10 seeds on a white board, and as they were destroyed, we crossed them off and wrote down what happened. After the story we reviewed what had happened to all the seeds. We also revisited the season. We wrote each Season on the board and the board and wrote down all the things we love to do during each season. She picked her favorite season and then completed an opinion/persuasive writing page defending her choice. For math we searched the room for 20 bunnies and traced the numbers.
Day 2: Signs of Spring Fill in the Blank Books and Base Ten
Spring discussions continues with a cute book. After we reviewed signs of spring we completed this cut interactive spring book. V not only had to read the book, she had to put in signs of spring photos and write the word on the blank.
Place value was introduced with this fun game and we built cute rainbow puzzles.
Day 3: Birds lay Eggs, Ways to Make 10 and Rhyming Home School Ideas
Birds lay eggs in the spring, we played a fun math game, painted secret sight words and built a rhyming flower!
Day 4: Rain in the Spring Make Flowers Grow, CVC Word Match and Ten Frames
Day 5: Spring Hunt, Graphing and Comparing Numbers
What I love most about teaching thematic lessons is that you can usually look right outside to see what you have actively learning about. That important vocabulary is right outside. So we had a blast on our spring nature hunt. We also graphed and compared numbers in a variety of ways.
If an activity didn’t click, we had other options. This unit could easily be spread 7-8 days.