Thursday, July 31, 2008

Dale's kindergarten, part 1

Tonight when we gathered with Dale for bedtime prayers he asked if we could turn the calendar that hangs by his bed.

He got pretty excited to see for himself that August starts tomorrow... August is a big month for him! Not only is his birthday later this month, but he starts KINDERGARTEN on Monday and he is pret-ty excited!

And so am I, to be honest. :)

As I mentioned before, this year will be pretty light. Our focal point for the year will be character studies.

Our basic framework for our character curriculum came from
this website.
If you have preschoolers and are interested in teaching activities do at home with them, please go give this website a look! I plan on using it with Alan in a year or so.
I used several of the ideas from their
Bible and Rhyme curriculum this spring and Dale and I both enjoyed it a lot. There are fewer specifics laid out for the character studies, but it does give a good list of traits and a rough idea of a schedule.

As a supplement, I ordered
this book:


It lists 12 of the 18 or so character traits we will study throughout the year. For each one, it gives a definition, and 4 example stories in which the trait was shown or should have been. One story is from the Bible, the other three are about a child in school, at play, and at home. Short, simple, & to the point!

Some of the character traits we will be learning to adopt as our own:

Being Attentive
Obedience
Contentment
Being Creative
Thankfulness
Joyfulness
Being Prayerful

Each one is also accompanied by a memory verse for the week (more on that in a future post) and we will also be looking to children's literature for other examples of these character traits. I plan on blogging about how we will be doing that, too. :)

Greg and I feel that if nothing else academic gets done in our school day, as long as we get our character lesson in we have done well. Of course, we have plans for things like phonics and math (whew... even more planned blogging!), but the character studies will be priority.

1 comment:

Teresa said...

Oh I am so glad I found your blog. It sounds like your son is exactly one year older than my daughter, so I will be able to learn a lot from you with all of your homeschooling.

We just recently decided to homeschool and are very excited. I can't wait to hear how your son's first day of kindergarten (at home) goes!