Update on my KINDERGARTNER!!!

That's right! I am officially calling Brina a kindergartner now! We started her K4 year last August using My Father's World Kindergarten curriculum. It was a very laid back curriculum that focused on Bible/character lessons, letter sounds, blending and science all centered around one theme each week. It has truly been a wonderful year. We kind of let it fall to the wayside some because many of the activities became too easy. We were ready to move on to a more rigorous phonics program. We will likely at least finish our butterfly unit just to do the butterfly habitat. :)

Since straying from the prescribed sequence in MFW K, we have done a few new things. We are currently using All About Reading Level 1 for phonics. Brina is thriving with this program! I can not say enough great things about it! She does get a little agitated at the fluency sheets, so we break them up over a course of a couple days. She loves the readers though. I am so glad we invested in this program .

We finished up Lesson 16 and 17 in AAR today. Lesson 16 teaches the sounds of consonant team "th." We learned the new sound, practiced it in words on our magnetic board and then played a super fun game.

She really enjoyed this game! She read the first side of this lesson's fluency sheet and will either do the rest later today or tomorrow. It's whatever she wants to do on this really. Sometimes she chooses to read it to Daddy at night. She requested to read out of the reader so that is why we ended up doing two lessons. We will just read it again tomorrow though. :p

For handwriting, we are now using Happy Handwriting. Brina is enjoying decorating the border and then coloring in her letters. Lol! Each letter has a little poem to help you remember how to write it.  Okay, so she's not the best at coloring, but it's not her favorite. We're working on it. She has come a long way. I am trying to stress now to stay on those lines. Our goal for the first semester of kindergarten is to get those letters on the correct lines. :)

This is pretty much how our days go. We are also doing Singapore Essentials Math K though as well. She is slowly working through that material. In July, we will start Heart of Dakota's Little Hearts for His Glory. I hope we are all up for the challenge!

Little Hands to Heaven: Unit 4

We finally finished up unit 4 of Little Hands to Heaven. We tried our best to enjoy some nice weather while we could. It gets hot here fast, so we have to just take advantage of the outdoors while we can. This "week" was full of great learning. The unit focused on the letter D and on Bible stories that centered around Isaac, Rebekah, Esau and Jacob. Acting out these stories was quite fun with the girls. I didn't get a ton of in action pictures this week though. I'll do a better job with this for the next post.

We use The New Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes as recommended by Heart of Dakota author Carrie Austin. The Bible stories for the first couple of days taught us how Isaac met his wife Rebekah. To act this out, we pretended to meet our stuffed animals for the first time. It was super cute. We went on in the last half of the week to learn about the story of Jacob and Esau. The girls learned how awful it is to lie. Jacob lied to his father to steal his brother's blessing. This was a great lesson for young children. We also learned about the ladder of angels show to Jacob. What a wonderful sight this would be to see! All in all, it was a wonderful week of Bible lessons.

Our favorite activity of the week was hiding our names-just as Jacob hid his true self from Isaac.

Mommy got in on this too to help motivate them to finish. :)

Here are a few more examples of activities my 3 year old did along with the curriculum this week. A few of these printables were made by my friend Dawn. I have a button for her blog on my sidebar (Mama of Monkeys) if you would like to check her out. :)

We also read a weekly devotional that is also recommended by Little Hands. We chose to go with Kenneth Taylor's Big Thoughts for Little People. We tried the other recommended devotional, My ABC Bible Verses, but it did not go over well here. This week we learned that D is for doing what needs to be done! We talked about helping others and doing chores the first time mommy and daddy ask them to do so. We have been reinforcing this more as they get older, so the lesson had very appropriate timing. This book has beautiful illustrations and I definitely recommend it.

For the next week, we will be reviewing the first four letters of the alphabet and reading some new Bible stories. I'm sure we will have another wonderful week. I am loving the layout of Little Hands to Heaven and can not wait to add in Little Hearts for Brina in July! I will definitely be blogging about our adventure with that as well.