Some Kindergarten Plans

My daughter is beginning Kindergarten this coming September. It's amazing how much more relaxed I am homeschooling the second child. She made the cutoff by barely a month. So as required by state law, I've begun filing our homeschool status this year for my daughter. She's teaching herself most things, so I've had to teach very little formally. All the toys she has picked out since she was able to express herself have been learning toys and books. We have several sets of tangrams, building toys, counting beads and blocks, linkers, wooden shapes and letters, etc. She likes those wooden Melissa & Doug toys. We've got the pattern set pictured here. Not only can you make the patterns and learn your shapes, but the shapes are good for sorting colors and shapes, counting, and building stuff.

She voluntarily works through the Starfall.com learning program. She enjoyed the free online version so much that we bought the cd-rom.

So it seems she has chosen a hands-on Montessori-esque learning approach paired with computer learning. My son was very different in Kindergarten. He only liked worksheets, books, coloring, and computer learning. He never took to manipulatives or hands-on learning. In fact, he loathed hands-on learning. We had to skip this and go directly to traditional learning via textbooks, workbooks, and reading which he still enjoys today.