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[1053]

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[nannyaunt]

You might try Easy Peasy All In One Homeschool www.allinonehomeschool.com.  I haven't really used it because my kid gets more screen time than he needs now and he is only 4, but I have heard good things about it.  It is free, and I believe all the resources are also online and free. 

 

There are free literature guides but I don't know them because we aren't there yet, but if you do a search you might find the threads about it.

 

You might try having her do some kind of journal where you do the scribing about books she reads and what she thinks of them, who the characters are, and what happened in the book.

 

www.dltk-kids.com has lots of crafty stuff.

 

www.first-school.ws has lots of crafty stuff too.

www.abcjesuslovesme.com has free handwriting worksheets and progression. 

www.letteroftheweek.com  has some things that go beyond teaching reading. 

 

 

Hunter has a thread titled Public Domain English First Draft is Finished.  She has done an enormous amount of research to put together a Language Arts type curriculum.  You might take a look at that also.  It seems to have everything you would need. 

 

There is a site called www.beestar.org.  I haven't really looked at it so I don't know if has anything you would find useful.

 

The curriculum that looks the most fun to me is Moving Beyond the Page. It seems to be full of crafts and projects.  It has some stuff I want to try at some point.  It looks like unit studies and while the entire kit is somewhat expensive, you can buy bits and pieces for a lot less.  And you can download it and only print what you need.

 

I use Memoria Press because I need a curriculum to stop me from workbooking my kid to death.  You might check them out, they have box kits you can buy or individual pieces.  I have called them several times and they have always been helpful and even talked me out of buying some things that we were not ready for.  I would say they are about middle of the road on price.

 

I have found most of the time, the "fun" isn't in the materials but in how I present it.  I have my kid thinking that "school work" has to involve worksheets and so "playing" with math manipulatives or doing fun stuff with letters is playing games.  So I try to do more playing than working. 

 

Most of my "fun" stuff is for learning to read and that doesn't really apply here so I am something of a loss as to what to suggest. 

 

You might try writing in shaving cream or make a rice tray(some people color the rice) - you put colored paper - like scrapbook paper under the rice and they "paint" letters with their fingers or a paint brush. You can do the same thing with sand.  I use the cheap stuff from Lowes, but my neighbor uses the expensive craft sand.  

 

Now I have thought of it, I would do as much sensory play as she will tolerate.  Cutting felt or those foam sheets with scissors.  You can print out pictures and have her glue felt or magnets on them ( I use the ones people give free - cut them up) and let her tell flannel board or cookie sheet stories.  Finger paint in the bathtub, or outside in the summer.  Sidewalk chalk is wonderful stuff. 

 

You can try www.two-daloo.com , the mom there has lots of sensory projects.  You might also check www.educationunboxed.com.  That is an amazing site with videos showing how to use Cuisenaire rods. 

 

We also play a game  I call find what is in the bag.  I have a black drawstring bag that I put pattern block shapes in and he has to find the one I say, like find the green triangle.  I will eventually put more things in there like blocks and different bead shapes and C-rods. 

 

Buy a stack of old magazines from Goodwill or sometimes the Library sells them cheap or gives them and cut pictures out to make collages.  Play-Doh, clay, homemade stuff for making just about anything.  We do baking from mixes and he gets to do the adding of everything including cracking eggs :). 

 

And of course there is the old standby of coloring with crayons, colored pencils, markers and colored chalk.  All these things can improve hand strength and fine motor skills.

 

One thing I would recommend to just about anyone is lots of physical play, running, jumping, swinging and also swimming lessons and gymnastics.  They both stress core body strength, upper body strength, contralateral and bilateral movement, timing, crossing midline and what is called "heavy" work.  This can have a positive impact on academics and fine motor activities.

 

I think most of this is not what you are looking for, but I tend to throw a lot of stuff out there in hopes that something will help or might spark an idea for you. 

 

Shannon

 

ETA:  I thought I should add www.ABCya.com, www.abcmouse.com and www.starfall.com.  We have only used the free stuff on www.starfall.com but he really likes it.

 

 

[Um_2_4]

What about montessori style grammar and using madlibs for review?

Using the HOWT app for handwriting?

Get those sentence making magnets/blocks for making up silly sentences together?

Do FIAR type unit studies for books you read together? 

Maybe AAS for spelling using only the magnets (no paper) so she builds the words and take it slow?

[1053]

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[Farrar]

Games for Reading and Games for Writing by Peggy Kaye. Lots of good light learning ideas in those for ELA.

 

Jot It Down from Brave Writer.

 

Schoolhouse Rock videos and the Brian Cleary books about parts of speech were a hit here at that age. I didn't expect the kids to understand them fully at that age, but they thought they were fun.

 

Books. Reading lots and lots of books. Reading silly poems. Reading picture books.

 

Poetry teas.

 

We used to play with things like Starfall for reading. Progressive Phonics was actually pretty "fun" for one of my boys and it's free.

 

The HWT letter pieces were totally fun. The HWT workbook not so much for my kids, but there are lots of good HWT type learning ideas out there - sandpaper letters, writing letters in shaving cream, writing letters with a sponge, making letters in playdoh, etc.

 

Coloring pages. It helps with small motor skills.

 

We used to play games with letter tiles a lot. And rhyming games. And find a word games. And finish the sentence games.

 

There are Mad Libs Jr books that I think some kids can use this young.

[sunnyday]

I feel like you got some good suggestions in the Accelerated forum a couple of weeks ago.

 

My DD5 goes to PS kindergarten, but if she didn't (and what we do when we can afterschool since she only attends half-time), we do AAS to cement some rules for encoding (and by extension decoding); I read to her and ask her to read to me in addition to her reading alone; and we use Rhythm of Handwriting to practice letter formation. She writes letters to people she knows and copies things from books she finds interesting, and sometimes I copy her stories down for her (a la Bravewriter). We have conversations about the things she's reading, and when we go to the library together (at least weekly) I put a few books in her path that I think she'd like or that seem culturally important (eg. fairy tale picture books). Sometimes she pulls Grammar Island down from the shelf but is not a fan of the discussion questions so we are not considering this an "official" runthrough of the program, just playing around with it. That's pretty much it for kindergarten language arts.

 

Remember that even precocious 5yos are still kindergarteners; they don't need hours of seatwork to be learning massive amounts about this world they've only been experiencing for five short years.

[mohini]

Since he's reading on his own anyway you might just do a CM style Reading journal. Let him narrate and you scribe - then he can copy a sentence or 2 and draw a picture for his book. It's a really nice, gentle and easy project - very educational (teaches comprehension, convention of language, analysis etc... really as little as much as you want to get into) and it makes a lovely keepsake. I used a large black blank-page sketchbook. You can glue in half a piece of handwriting paper if you want him to use lines when writing.

 

ETA - You can do it with both read alouds and independent reading books - even audiobooks if you're so inclined.