BJU Press Blog

early learning

3 Ways to Enjoy Kindergarten

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kindergarten

Both my school-age daughters love to learn. I knew my firstborn would; she was the child that could sit and listen to me read for hours. But I was a little more nervous when I sent my second daughter off to K4 last fall. As my active child, she never stops moving (or talking) all day. I wasn’t sure how she was going to handle sitting and listening, and I was afraid that she was going to come to hate school from the very beginning. The fact that she too loves to learn is a wonderful surprise and is no doubt a result of both the curriculum the school used (BJU Press Footsteps for Fours) and her amazing teacher.

My daughter’s teacher was truly amazing, and she taught me a lot about teaching kindergarteners and instilling in them an early love for learning. Below are some of the things I learned that you could apply in your teaching.

1. Divide Up the Learning

A lot of kindergarteners won’t be able to sit for long periods of time, so divide up your lessons into fifteen- to twenty-minute segments. These frequent breaks will help keep young minds fresh and focused.

2. Make Time for Play
Remember that play is a big part of learning for four- and five-year-olds, so make time for it in your daily schedule. When the weather is nice, allow them to play outside and work on improving their strength and coordination as they run, throw balls, or play on playground equipment. Indoor activities such as role-playing or building with blocks are also helpful because they help build social and problem-solving skills.

3. Engage the Senses
Lessons that engage multiple senses not only help concepts “stick,” but they also help make learning more fun. The teacher’s editions that correspond to the BJU Press kindergarten curricula include a lot of ideas for multisensory learning activities (such as divvying up snacks in Math K5 to illustrate parts of a whole). Additional ideas can be found on homeschooling blogs and Pinterest boards.

Kindergarten is a special time. During the kindergarten years, your children are going to be introduced to a lot of concepts for the very first time, and you’ll be there to witness those special moments—when they succeed in writing their names for the first time, when they read their first words, and when they realize they can count to a hundred.

Enjoy these years even more by helping your child enjoy them too.

Ready to Learn: A Benefit of Preschool Curriculum

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image of young boy working on a BJU Press preschool textbook

When my oldest daughter completed kindergarten last summer, I was ready to make sure that she wouldn’t experience any of the summer learning loss that I had read so much about. I had purchased BJU Press’s Vacation Stations: Beyond the Back Door workbook and carefully planned a daily summer schedule that would allow us time to review concepts and practice reading.

I also planned to do preschool with my three-year-old daughter to help keep her occupied and to prepare her for four-year-old kindergarten in the fall. I talked to some friends about my intentions, and they suggested that I purchase a preschool workbook from a store like Walmart® or Sam’s Club™.

Unlike complete curriculum packages, workbooks do not include instructional materials. However, I was pretty confident in my ability to teach preschool-level skills. After shopping around, I found what I thought was the perfect workbook. Designed for ages three-to-five, it contained almost three hundred pages of full-color, perforated pages. The activities looked fun. It promised to help my daughter learn skills such as the alphabet, shapes, numbers, colors, and more. It even included a CD-ROM. Best of all was its price tag—$5.99.

My daughter was excited to do “school” along with her big sister, but that excitement soon turned into frustration. The workbook was asking her to do things that she was not prepared to do. For example, the first page in the section designed to teach color skills directed her to color a picture of a crayon blue, trace the word blue (the font being only 2-3 inches high) and draw a picture of a blue house. She had not developed the fine motor skill needed to do the tracing or the drawing. We ran into another such difficulty in the number section. At the top of the page she was shown three objects and was directed to circle the object that only appeared once in the larger picture at the bottom of the page. My daughter was utterly confused.

After a few weeks of repeated frustration, we completely abandoned the workbook. Even though my daughter didn’t learn the alphabet or her numbers over the summer, she’s learning them now with the help of BJU Press’s Footsteps for Fours curriculum. Her experience with this curriculum has been completely positive—she enjoys it so much that she wants to do school all day long.

It’s easy to think that the concepts taught in preschool and kindergarten are so basic that you don’t need a curriculum, but this experience taught me differently. One of the biggest values of an early-learning curriculum is in its sequencing. Within a good curriculum, skills and concepts are taught in certain order; they build on one another. The result of sequencing is that children are prepared for the introduction of new skills and concepts. They don’t get frustrated because they have been given all the tools they need to succeed. And succeed they will. Not only will they gain new knowledge and skills, but they will have the confidence they need for continued success.

Help for Moms with Struggling Young Readers

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alphabet flashcards spread out on a table

In July, I wrote a post about how to know when your child is ready to start kindergarten. But what if you’ve already started, and your child is having trouble? Let me tell you about my friend (whom I’ll refer to as Amanda) when her youngest son (Joel) was struggling with learning to read. Here’s how they found success.

Amanda had no worries about Joel starting kindergarten. He was four and a half, four months older than his older brother (William) had been when he had started. William had learned to read in K5 and had breezed through his early elementary years in a Christian school, exceeding both his parents’ and his teachers’ expectations. Although circumstances had changed and Amanda was now homeschooling, she didn’t expect Joel’s experience to be much different.

“I assumed that we would never have a problem,” Amanda told me. After all, Amanda was a former third-grade teacher. She was confident in her teaching ability. She was also confident in her curriculum choice—BJU Press—which “laid everything out for me. I knew exactly what to do.”

Joel completed K4 and K5.  He would often answer his brother’s third-grade math problems. But at the end of K5, Joel still wasn’t reading.

“I didn’t think that much about it,” Amanda admits. “BJU Press does not expect mastery of every concept at the kindergarten level, so I just thought that he would pick it up in first grade. I figured that he just needed more time.”

But they got into first grade, and Amanda found herself spending all morning with just the reading aspect of the curriculum. And Joel wasn’t getting it.

“I remember sitting at the dinner table one night. My husband asked Joel what he had learned in school that day. Joel didn’t remember. I said, ‘The letter T.’ My husband asked Joel what sound T made. Joel made several attempts at an answer, but none of them were right. We had spent all morning on this concept. And he still wasn’t getting it. I realized at that point that we were in trouble.”

“It was the most frustrating experience for both of us,” Amanda relates. “I was frustrated. Joel was frustrated. And I started thinking, ‘What do I do? Should I repeat him? Should I pull him back to kindergarten?’”

She sought the advice of a friend that taught K5 at a Christian school. Her friend advised her to just keep on going. She told Amanda that for a lot of boys, reading “clicks” the second half of first grade. Another friend of Amanda’s with a lot of teaching experience seconded that advice. “You’re homeschooling,” she reminded Amanda. “You can do whatever you want. Make accommodations. Think outside the box and try teaching it another way.”

Amanda went to the craft store and bought decorative letters, punched them out, and let Joel paint them. She went to the hardware store and bought sandpaper and had Joel trace letters on it. “We did a lot of hands-on,” Amanda tells me. “Nothing by itself seemed to be making a difference, but we kept doing it.”

They kept plugging away, and then in the spring, something happened. Joel started reading.

“It finally just all came together for him,” Amanda remembers with a smile. “He wasn’t a great reader by the end of first grade, but he was reading. And he’s done fine ever since.”

Joel is indeed doing well. He’s entering his senior year in high school and is looking toward the future. He wants to attend college next year to study criminal justice and history. Amanda is obviously proud of the young man he has become. “Those days that we struggled were horrible—I wouldn’t want to repeat them. But I’m glad we didn’t pull Joel back into kindergarten or have him repeat first grade,” she tells me. “Intensely focusing on phonics instruction was the right thing to do even though it took a lot of time and energy. Joel ended up succeeding. And since we were homeschooling, his success was my success too.”

Early Start to Homeschool Kindergarten

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Learning the Alphabet
© iStockphoto.com/pkfawcett

Last fall, I had big plans for starting kindergarten with my daughter. Though not yet five years old, she had mastered the K4-level materials, so why not move on to K5 and give her a head start on life? On the other hand, I wondered if I would be robbing her of her childhood or setting her up for failure by beginning before she was ready. It was with these questions in mind that I asked advice from Carol, a mom who has twenty-five years of homeschool experience. While her family’s situation was slightly different from my own, I knew her insight would be valuable as my husband and I made this decision.

Carol began by explaining that we should approach this decision just like any other decision—by praying for wisdom. She said, “Carefully consider the reasons for the early start, make a good assessment to determine if the child is ready, get counsel and input from a few others you respect, use a good curriculum, and keep praying for wisdom. Don’t forget to have fun right along with your child!”

That struck me as perfect advice for parents of four- and five-year-olds. But I wasn’t sure what specifics I should look for to answer the question “Is my child ready for kindergarten?” Carol explained, “Some of the signs I looked for to gauge my daughter’s readiness for K5 included attention span, cooperation, motor skills, maturity level, and a desire to learn.”

These signs resonated with me because my daughter was still developing fine motor skills and maturity. Carol chose to start K5 with most of her children when they were five years old, but she began K5 with her youngest child when she was four. “After much prayer, seeking God’s wisdom, and confirmation from my husband,” Carol said, “I decided to begin K5 with my youngest child a couple months before she turned five years old. Many factors went into that decision, including her desire and enthusiasm to start K5, her success in completing K4, and my knowledge of the BJU Press K5 curriculum and experience of teaching it to my other children.” She added, “I definitely would not recommend beginning K5 at that age unless the child is ready. K5 should be a successful foundation, not a frustration. As it turned out, my daughter handled kindergarten very well.”

That curriculum helped Carol’s children enjoy learning. The education materials you choose will have a major impact on your child’s enjoyment of learning. “Each child is unique,” she said, “but all four of my children loved the BJU Press K5 curriculum and were very successful in accomplishing the objectives. They had fun learning and looked forward to school.”

Carol’s youngest is now in high school, so I asked how the early start in kindergarten had affected her daughter’s transition into later grades. Carol’s answer relieved some of my concerns. “Up through the end of eighth grade, she seemed ready for each successive grade emotionally, physically, and academically. Her scores on the Iowa Tests® have always been well above average and confirmed that she was ready to move on to the next grade level. Her transition into high school this year has been the first ‘hitch’ so far.”

Not exactly sure what caused the “hitch,” Carol’s been learning to trust God through it. She says, “My daughter has seemed overwhelmed at times with the amount of material covered in a day and also the number of quizzes and tests required. I’m not sure that this current bumpy road is due to the school grade as much as just adjusting to the teen years. It’s keeping this mom humble and praying and depending on God.”

After thinking through Carol’s advice and discussing the matter, my husband and I decided to wait on kindergarten. Our family situation this past year included a move and a new baby. So we continued to do preschool activities along with some basic reading instruction. My daughter loved learning how to read, but I’m thankful I held back on a full kindergarten program. The short and sweet period before formal schooling gave her time to develop her fine motor skills and to mature emotionally so that kindergarten will be less of a challenge and more of a joy.

Off to a Great Start: Kindergarten and BJU Press

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Closeup of cute little girl coloring drawing with mother 10415184
© iStockphoto.com/vgajic

Two years ago, my oldest daughter started using the Footsteps for Fours curriculum from BJU Press. Since she was my oldest child, I was both excited and apprehensive about her starting school.  She was young at that point—two months shy of turning four. But everyone assured me that she was ready.  Even at the age of three she loved to learn. She would sit for hours and listen to me or my husband read books. And she asked questions constantly.

As a parent, I wanted my daughter’s introduction to formal schooling to be a good experience. I didn’t want her to suffer through her schoolwork every day for the next fourteen years—I wanted her to like it.

It was also very important to me that what she learned in school would reinforce what my husband and I were teaching her. In our home, we do our best to live out the Word of God in all areas of life. I wanted her schooling to help us with that goal.

BJU Press was perfect for her. She grew so much that first year—not only did she learn foundational skills that helped her learn to read once she reached K5, but she also grew in her understanding of God and the Bible. For example, she learned through stories about Jake and his family (fictional characters that appear in the Footsteps curriculum) the importance God places on loving your neighbors and sharing your faith. That year she was so burdened for one of our neighbors who was unsaved that, on her own initiative, she invited him to an Easter service at our church.

She also learned to love school from the very beginning. The Footsteps for Fours curriculum includes a lot of active learning. Instruction is carefully balanced with the use of learning centers where kids can learn through play. And there’s no dry lecturing—instead there are a lot of stories, singing, action rhymes, and hands-on activities. I also appreciated the fact that what she was learning was not only age appropriate, but the concepts built on one another in a logical manner. She was never frustrated by her schoolwork.

My daughter completed the BJU Press K5 materials about a month ago. But, in a way, she never finished school. She loves learning so much that she’s always doing school in her imagination. I often find her and her younger sister up in their room playing school with their dolls. She is usually the teacher, but sometimes she is the student. A few days ago, we took a walk to a nearby playground. When we arrived, my middle daughter immediately headed for the swings, but my oldest daughter sat down at a picnic table, pulled a pencil and small notebook out of her pocket, and informed me that she needed to work on her schoolwork. She had assigned herself the task of writing the names of the days of the week in order.  School is fun for her, and I attribute that, at least in part, to the BJU Press curriculum.