This is round 3 of Kindergarten for our family. Our youngest is starting his first official year of schooling!
I have a dirty little secret to tell you. Come in close because I’m going to whisper it: I didn’t really officially try to teach my kids their letters or numbers AT ALL until I was ready to officially teach kindergarten. I did a little bit with our oldest because he was the firstborn and every mother tries to teach their kids “school” early with their first child, right?
I say this to encourage you if you feel “behind” in teaching your child if you happen to have a 5 year old who has not learned to read or write all their numbers and letters. If it’s stressing you out to work with your preschooler on this, you can quit and everything will end up okay. If you and your preschooler LOVE to work on writing and reading, go for it. If not, give yourself permission to let them just play. They can even play games that aren’t specifically educational.
That brings me to the point of this, our 5 year old has just started Kindergarten and we’re using All About Reading, Prereading program for him.
It systematically and gently goes through teaching all the uppercase letters and then the lowercase letters and then the sounds for the letters. It introduces understanding the beginning and ending sounds of words, hearing the syllables and rhyming. All of these things are tremendous building blocks to reading. It’s 78 lessons. Once we finish that, we’ll move on to level one.
Isaac loves it. He loves the puppet, Ziggy and he enjoys the coloring pages for the letters and he thinks the games are fun. Basically, if the puppet asks him to try something, he does. I’m considering using Ziggy to encourage all my kids in their chores 😉 He seems more effective than Mom.