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How To Make American History For Kindergarten An Exciting Adventure
Do you have some curious adventurers in your homeschool? Me too! Kindergarten is such an exciting age; everything is a new adventure. Making American History for Kindergarten a memorable experience is easy with Sonlight. If you are a homeschool parent who is looking to teach your early learners history through inspiring stories, you will love what we have to share with you.
Planning history for kindergarten can be tricky; how much is too much? Or which American History books are best for that age range? Most of us know what we need to teach our Kindergarteners when it comes to math or reading, but history isn’t as simple. That’s why we love Sonlight for a literature-based history curriculum. They take all of the guesswork out of planning an exciting year of history, that is perfect for kinder aged kiddos.
Sonlight has been around since 1989 and we are honored that we finally got a chance to see what all of the buzz is about. Everyone I know has nothing but good things to say about Sonlight curriculum, and I am glad we got to see why first hand.
We were thrilled to receive the new Exploring American History: History/Bible/Literature K Package for Kindergarteners or children age 5-6. Reading is a huge part of our homeschool, and we knew we were in for an adventure when we saw the Heroes and Happenings books from Sonlight.
Sonlight Makes American History For Kindergarten Come To Life With Books
My children, probably like yours, are curious and ready to dive into exciting stories. Reading has always been a huge part of our homeschool, and this package was a perfect fit for us.
The Heroes and Happenings books from the HBL K package presents adventurous stories all from American History. Sixty different age-appropriate stories that had my kids ramped up after each one. If the story was an account of an inventor, botanist, or explorer that day, that might be the imaginary adventure they would take later that afternoon. I love that my children were inspired to pretend play out the exciting biographies we had read earlier in the day. It also let me know that they enjoyed these brave characters and were retaining the stories they heard.
Read alouds can easily help you take your children on adventures they will remember. American History is the perfect subject to incorporate picture book based reading too. History is the retelling and study of past events and what better way to do that than through age-appropriate literature.
What Does A Week Of American History For Kindergarten Look Like?
You may be wondering what exactly your students will be doing when you decide to use Exploring American History:Â History /Bible / Literature K?
You will receive an Instructor’s Guide that quickly walks you through your entire set-up of the curriculum. Sonlight wants to make teaching easy for you; that way, you can spend more time bonding with your Kindergartener over quality books and literature.
With the Instructor’s Guide in hand, you will simply follow an open-and-go daily plan. Sonlight has already planned a 4-day a week homeschool schedule for you to use.
I loved the way they let you know what books you need and when right upfront. This is great for organizing your readers and knowing what to expect.
Each day you will read from The One Year Bible for Children and work on your memory verse for the week. What a wonderful way to begin each day!
You and your children will enjoy reading aloud from various books and your history spine, Heroes and Happenings. Sonlight does a fantastic job of blending all the best books and stories together to align new topics and history.
Lastly, Sonlight includes everything you need to ask the right discussion questions for curious early learners. Inside your Instructor’s Guide, you have discussion questions, timeline prompts, and map points to discover.
Your children can learn so much in a short amount of time when it is well-planned. We naturally integrated history into our homeschool with this approach.
Why Choose Sonlight For Your Homeschool?
- 4 Day-a-Week Schedule – With Sonlight’s 4-day-a-week schedule, you can accomplish more in less time. Sonlight’s program makes it possible to homeschool four days a week, and leave Fridays open for co-op, sports, and other fun things! You can structure your four days a week, however it works best for you and your family. You will even have the option to choose a 5-day-a-week program if that works better for you. Either way you choose, flexibility is key when it comes to homeschooling, and Sonlight knows this!
- Open-and-Go Plans – An open-and-go curriculum means no planning or prep work for mom. That is a big time saver, especially if you have multiple children. Planning for multiple students each week or month can be overwhelming with all of the other responsibilities homeschool moms have. By using an open-and-go curriculum, you can save so much time and limit stress.
- Literature-Based Curriculum – You can eliminate textbooks and enjoy learning with good quality literature. For Kindergarteners, that means picture book based learning until they grow into other readers. With the HBL K program, children also get the beautiful experience of incorporating family read aloud time together. What a fantastic way to begin learning!
- Christian Program – Sonlight is a Christian education company. In their signature style, they weave the Bible into everything. If you are a Christian homeschooling family, you will appreciate how Sonlight blends Bible, History, and Literature together.
If you are looking for history for kindergarten, I highly recommend taking a look at Sonlight’s Exploring American History: History / Bible / Literature K for your 5 to 6-year-old. Your children will immensely enjoy this adventure through history with fantastic literature.
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I’m not using Sonlight as my core curriculum but I’m interested in layering this in for history this year. My only concern is that I wasn’t planning on teaching history every day. I was planning on only doing one elective – in addition to our daily math + LA program – each day. Ie. On Monday we’d do Reading, writing, Math + science on Monday…reading, writing, math + history on Tuesday, etc. I’m trying to figure out if I can integrate the HBL-K program into this weekly schedule. I’m a new homeschooler so trying to keep it simple, but comprehensive. My oldest will be in 1st grade and my middle daughter will be in Kinder. thanks!
That is a great question! If you are comfortable enough to use it and let the schedule be just a guide, you could totally adapt a weekly history lesson from the curriculum. You would of course need to pick and choose what books and activities you want to use and which things you prefer to skip over. But as with all curriculum guides, they are suggestions, anything can be adaptable to your family and your routine. But, it would be extremely difficult to try and use their schedule which is meant to be 4-day a week guide and try to cram all of it in one day per week. Another suggestion would be to use only the Heroes and Happenings books and read through one lesson/bio per week. That would probably be the easiest way to try and use them if you only have one day a week dedicated to history. We hope that helps! – The Team @HMA