How I’m Teaching My Toddler Kindergarten Early

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I’ve posted a few posts on early learning and homeschooling. One of my more popular post goes over how I’m teaching my toddler to read, and now I’m going to go over how we are learning Kindergarten early! I am jumping into Kindergarten curriculum because we are ready. I’ve got an eager learner, who wants to learn to spell everything, loves to write, and he has a huge appetite for stories. I can only tell so many stories, so I want him to be able to read them on his own. The difficult part for me, venturing into the home school idea, was how to know what to teach. What if I don’t teach him everything he’s supposed to know?? If I miss something, and he’s behind, it’s completely my fault! There are actually a to of resources when it comes to home schooling children, and I came across the Kindergarten Toolkit, and I saw it offered the curriculum I needed to know I was teaching the right concepts, as well as the simple tools to do it!

Here’s a run-down of what’s included in the kit:

1. Kindergarten Curriculum: This is what I needed most. Something to guide me, and ensure I don’t miss any core concepts. The toolkit has 10 goals outlined for me to make sure we achieve. The goals consist of recognizing upper and lower case letters, reading sight words recognizing shapes and colors, counting and more. It’s recommended that you look at each of the goals, and work on assessing where your child is with everything.
2. Flash Cards: I love these. They are simple and big. We have sight words, upper and lower case letters, numbers, shapes and colors. I keep them in a special drawer, and I pull out the ones we are going to work with. For now, I am really focused on developing reading skills, so we are doing the sight words.
3. Whiteboard, dry-erase marker, eraser and chalk. The whiteboard has been so much fun. We haven’t used a white board until now, so that made it extra exciting for him. We work on writing all of our site words, as well as writing the words we are learning in our BOB Books. These are words like, “cat” “mat” “and” and “sat.” I grabbed some books at our library, but you can order the whole set on Amazon too.

Overall thoughts on the Kindergarten Toolkit:

I am very happy with this kit because I have the guidelines I need to ensure I am teaching everything necessary. My biggest fear as a home schooling mom, is that I am going to miss something, and my child will lack knowledge, rather than be ahead. With this, I have a set of goals for us to achieve! In addition to the goals, there are lesson ideas for each goal. For example,

Goal #3 is to write first and last name with upper and lower case letters. The tools needed are the lined paper included in the back of the curriculum, whiteboard and pen. Simple. Then, I’m advised to dot the letters if we need to, and have my preschooler write their name 3-5 times. We use both the whiteboard and lined paper to do this. This is still one of our goals. We can write all upper case letters, and spell words, but we haven’t been able to write the letters in the right order yet. So, I have set this as our most immediate goal to achieve!

I have over all goals to teach First Grade here soon, so this ensures I don’t miss anything as we move towards learning the first grade. Benjamin is only just over four, so we are cruising along early, but not rushed at all. We work on school work about once a week, and reading the BOB Books every other night or so. He is memorizing the words, rather than sounding them out, which makes it tricky because it’t easy to think he’s reading, when he’s just memorizing. Not sure what to do about that yet.

To learn more, you can head to their website or Etsy shop, follow them on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest or send them an email at: thekindergartentoolkit@gmail.com.

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