Our New and Improved Kindergarten Homeschool Schedule

Well, our previous Kindergarten schedule didn't quite work out for us during our test phase of it, so we have moved on to a less defined schedule.

I've left out dance/karate practice and haven't scheduled any type of P.E. I figure we do that anyway, there's no need to schedule it then feel bad that we missed that specific type of P.E. for the third day in a row.

I've also left all time frames on our schedules, there are days we only spend 5 minutes doing something and days we spend an hour on it. This helps us to be much more flexible and it is more enjoyable also!

A lesson from "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" takes about 20 minutes, and we spend an additional 5 minutes on some other small activity to keep things fresh, with Starfall taking longer since our son enjoys it. Math takes about 15 minutes or so each day. Japanese varies depending on if we simply do 5 minutes of flash kanji flash cards or spend 30 minutes listening to videos online.

We spend anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours a day on unit studies, which cover everything from history to art depending on what unit we're learning about at the time. The time spent on units varies greatly depending on what art project is planned.

So in total we spend around 2-4 hours a day doing homeschool for kindergarten. We usually do Language arts, Math, and Japanese then have a break before doing units.

So, here it is:

Monday - Thursday:
Language Arts (one lesson from "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons", additional activity)
Math (with manipulatives)
Japanese
Unit Studies

Tuesday we also do a few workbook pages from random store-bought workbooks.

Friday is "Fun Friday" where I try to keep everything different as a nice change. We don't do units on Friday. On Friday we do puzzles, board games, beginner computer art class (I'm teaching him the basics of Inkscape), a science experiment, and some kind of regular art project that isn't centered around a unit study. This ranges from playing with play-doh to him cutting and gluing and making something crazy on his own.

*We also read unit books about our unit topic everyday, along with fun reading at night, but I didn't include that in the schedule because I really like the short and simple layout of our new and improved schedule vs. the cluttered look of our old one. I am glad I had time to do a test run of our schedule before we were "officially" homeschooling so i could work out what does and doesn't work for us!