Lesson Planning for Kindergarten

[Clarita]

Just wondering how people actually approach lesson planning for Kindergarten. We just finished week 3 and I don't feel like I have a good system. I just feel like a lot of stuff out there would work for older kids where you are going to cover more subjects per day. 

Currently I made a system where I plan for the next week. I just list out all the topics and potential activities for them for the next week. My issues are I feel like I should have a month or 2 planned out in advance so I can get materials together, but how do I know how quickly we are going to go through math and reading/LA lessons. Or what is a good way to plan but still build in some flexibility if we need to spend more or less time somewhere.

The other issue I have is how often (much) I should do math, and reading/LA. I feel like I could only do one challenging activity a day with my son at this age. Which means each day I feel like I'm choosing between doing math or reading/LA and at the same time I wonder if we should be doing both. How do I do that without burning out my kid? 

Leading to the final issue that I have which is how do I fit in the other challenging subjects I'm suppose to fit in. Things like handwriting, cutting/gluing, foreign language, etc. This may also be a my kid specific problem because my son does not arts and crafts for fun so cutting/gluing/folding and handwriting are a lot of times more challenging than his age appropriate math work.

[wendyroo]

All of my kids, including my K'ers, have daily written/picture subject lists. When the kids are young, the subjects are fairly vague and they have options for how to fulfill each. All of the options are split into short snippets of work. They also have a lot of flexibility as to which order they work through the subjects. To fit in more content in our days, I read aloud during snacks and meals, and we watch educational videos in the car while traveling to extracurriculars - the extracurriculars also help add a lot of breadth to our studies. We also have daily chores and board game time which both act as good practice in social skills, critical thinking, executive function, etc.

Last year my youngest was in K. Each day (we work 6 days a week) there were 5 subjects on her list: Math, Reading, and "Fine Motor" each day; Spanish 3 days, Piano 3 days, Speech Therapy 3 days, Science 2 days and Composition 1 day.

For math she had Singapore 1a, Scholastic math riddle worksheets, playing Sum Swamp, and various other activities depending on her level throughout the year. For reading she had OPGTR, Explode the Code, Word Sorts, and tons of readers. For fine motor she had a handwriting workbook, a craft/cutting/gluing work book, a maze book, q-tip painting (and other art/craft options) and All About Spelling 1 (which she only wanted to work from because her brothers use it).

For Spanish we use homegrown comprehensible input with lots of activity options. For piano we were just aiming for exposure; her oldest brother oversaw her lessons and gave her lots of options: note reading and rhythm games, simple duets, mimic playing, etc. Speech therapy was practice, so she chose one of the assigned activities each day. Science was coloring pages while listening to Mr. Q with her next older brother. And Composition was 2 WWE oral narration assignments.

All of this sounds like a lot, but my K'ers tend to spend ~10-15 minutes on each subject...so right around an hour total of academics, and no more than 20ish minutes of table work split into a couple shorter sessions. Plus lots of read alouds, nature, chores, cooking/baking, board games, science and art exploration, puzzles, free play with math manipulatives, "field trips" (mostly in the form of leisurely daily errands during non-Covid times), and lots and lots of free play time.

[Not_a_Number]

Right now, with my kindergartener, we do about 30 minutes of math, 20 minutes of writing, 10 minutes of spoken Russian, and 30 minutes of piano she doe in the evening. She also does a bunch of fun receptive stuff: listening to me read books, watching a Russian cartoon with DD9, and reading whatever she feels like (right now, that's often Calvin and Hobbes, although it can also be something more challenging -- it varies.)

I do make their schedules, so that I can make sure to be available to them when they are working on things -- for us, interactive work is important. I'm rather regretting not being stricter with my older girl, so I'm expecting DD5 to put in quite a lot of independent work, compared to what I expected of DD9 at that age. 

I'm also spending much more time with DD5 building up appropriate learning behaviors than I did with DD9, since the lack of discipline has been biting us as she grows older. 

[Clarita]

@wendyrooand @Not_a_Number thank you for the responses. We definitely have some work to do to build up to that amount of schoolwork. Re-reading my post, seeing your responses and reflecting on our past week makes me think a big part of our current issue may be his fine motor skills taking up so much energy from him. I may have to add "fine motor" as a subject he needs to complete. I just see the days when math, reading, LA, Science, is all oral or manipulative play then we breeze through the subjects. When his math involves a worksheet where he has to glue and/or cut squares or write a number down then a task that may have taken him 2 min orally takes 20 min. 

[Rosie_0801]

Working on both English and maths every day doesn't have to mean new material in both every day. We'd push forward on one until dd hit a wall, then keep that subject in maintenance mode until she hit a wall in the other and we switched the focus back.

 

[wendyroo]

3 hours ago, Clarita said:

@wendyrooand @Not_a_Number thank you for the responses. We definitely have some work to do to build up to that amount of schoolwork. Re-reading my post, seeing your responses and reflecting on our past week makes me think a big part of our current issue may be his fine motor skills taking up so much energy from him. I may have to add "fine motor" as a subject he needs to complete. I just see the days when math, reading, LA, Science, is all oral or manipulative play then we breeze through the subjects. When his math involves a worksheet where he has to glue and/or cut squares or write a number down then a task that may have taken him 2 min orally takes 20 min. 

For something like that, I would let my K’er count that worksheet as both math and fine motor. Or I might say something like, “That cutting gave your fingers a good workout. Let’s call that your fine motor work and play Sum Swamp for math.”

All of my K’ers have/had ADHD with other special needs and pencil phobia. We do very, very little fine motor work in any of our other subjects. I often “trick” them into fine motor work in everyday life (folding paper, cracking eggs, tweezer challenge games for prizes, playing around on the piano and ukulele, manipulating board games pieces, playdoh, etc), but math and reading almost never involve putting pencil to paper. 

Let me know if you need more ideas for ways to do core subjects other than pencil and paper. 

[HomeAgain]

33 minutes ago, wendyroo said:

For something like that, I would let my K’er count that worksheet as both math and fine motor. Or I might say something like, “That cutting gave your fingers a good workout. Let’s call that your fine motor work and play Sum Swamp for math.”

All of my K’ers have/had ADHD with other special needs and pencil phobia. We do very, very little fine motor work in any of our other subjects. I often “trick” them into fine motor work in everyday life (folding paper, cracking eggs, tweezer challenge games for prizes, playing around on the piano and ukulele, manipulating board games pieces, playdoh, etc), but math and reading almost never involve putting pencil to paper. 

Let me know if you need more ideas for ways to do core subjects other than pencil and paper. 

This is similar to how we approached kindergarten.

OP, I made a spreadsheet table for lessons.  It let me approach a week as a whole, and then break it down into parts.  Every hands on/motor skills activity I planned was color coded.  I took note of how many we were doing each day and tried to rotate them through subjects, while also creating a connected program across the subjects so that really, we were doing One Big Thing broken into little parts.  If we weren't doing enough hands on, I could figure out where I could add more.

For math, I invested in number tiles, blocks, and shapes.  He didn't have to write it down.  He had to know the answer.  So on days where we might be working on fine motor skills elsewhere in a harder way, he still had hands on math.  I invested in magnetic letters, stencils, and other things for handwriting, too, so on days he might write more in another subject, he still got motor skill work in language arts.  Little things like that made a big difference.

[Clemsondana]

My 2 are older now, but when they were in K-2 the schoolwork portion of their day was short.  Each day, we did math, some sort of reading/spelling/literature, handwriting, and something for science, history, music, art, or geography (we did these in blocks, 2-8 weeks each, so we weren't switching around a lot).  We were very 'do the next thing' except for the the blocks - for those, we read from Hirsh's 'What your X needs to know' or from a pile of books from the library about the topic, or maybe we did something hands-on.  We did have a co-op day where my kids usually took art or some hands-on crafty class, which took some of the 'do projects with supplies' pressure off of me.  

We usually spent around 30 minutes each on the subjects except for handwriting, which usually only took around 10 minutes.  The reading/spelling varied.  In K, we did a bit of phonics until we finished the program.  I would often do a bit of spelling orally - just spell the phonics words that we were working on, or, with my advanced speller, spell some words from other subjects.  Sometimes instead of orally we'd use letter magnets or letter cards from a flash card set, or we'd get a dry erase marker and they'd write on the sliding glass door (writing big is different than writing on paper).  As they got a bit older or finished the handwriting book, we might do the spelling list as handwriting practice.  That only happened if kiddo could do the writing, though - I didn't want them to miss spelling words because they were trying to remember how to form letters.  I would also read poetry or fables or idiom examples or other types of kid lit out loud.

They did math in a workbook, but some days I scribed for them rather than having them do the writing.  It wasn't daily, but if it was the kind of day where they were 'out of writing patience' and weren't going to be able to do as much math as I wanted due to writing, then I wrote.  That was only for K and maybe 1.  For the subjects that we did in blocks, there was very little output in elementary.  I read, or they read, or we watched, or sometimes we did a project.  Occasionally we'd fold a piece of paper into 2-8 parts to compare different things, or draw a picture and label the water cycle or parts of a plant or color a map.  They did an Evan-Moore workbook about maps in K - they didn't find it difficult, but they enjoyed it. We didn't do any other workbooks on those topics for several years.  

Different families handle the planning and scheduling differently.  I tend to put most of my time into big-picture planning and materials selection. My kids prefer routines and knowing what to expect, so after the first few weeks when I'm evaluating how long certain things take I don't do a lot of planning - we just follow the same general template of activities for each week, and periodically I'd say 'Enough geography - lets move on to art history for a while'.  Obviously if we have a 'we do projects on Friday' plan then I have to plan the project, but it gave us all a framework.  In early elementary, I wanted to expose my kids to things and we wanted to get a good foundation in the 3Rs, but I wanted them to have a lot of free time to explore.  I had educational toys - blocks and building sets, dress-up and play kitchen stuff, good games, floor puzzles and small puzzles, craft supplies, etc, and they had lots of time to use them.  One kid spent hours re-enacting battles with a cheap bucket of army men and ships made out of cardboard boxes (kid would glue penne pasta along the flaps to make gun turrets).  

[Not_a_Number]

My kids don’t have trouble with fine motor stuff, so it hasn’t been a problem to have them write both math and printing. That being said, math is usually like 5 problems… not much writing. And printing is a page or two in a HWOT workbook.

[8filltheheart]

I don't write daily plans for my kids until they are in about 3rd grade.  My kids' progress when they were younger has always been completely erratic and uneven.  Writing plans in advance would have meant having to completely alter them repeatedly.  Sometimes they would master concepts quickly and would make huge leaps and other times they would struggle and would slow way down.  For those ages, I would simply record what we did after the fact.

Our daily routine for K-2 included math, handwriting, phonics, and reading.  Those are the only subjects I recorded and did every day.  The rest was just life in our home.  Read alouds, nature exploration/hiking, etc are things we do all of the time.  

My younger kids spent a lot of time playing.  Arts and crafts, Legos, Playmobil, etc were normal activities they would spend hrs doing.  

[Clarita]

Thank you for all the responses. I think we have to make a bigger effort to get some sort of math, reading and writing in 4 days a week, but dial down on the amount of writing/gluing/cutting by doing some of it for him.

6 hours ago, Clemsondana said:

We did have a co-op day where my kids usually took art or some hands-on crafty class, which took some of the 'do projects with supplies' pressure off of me.  

Our co-op classes start at the end of the month. I'm really looking forward to that. (The messy projects really stress me out.)

5 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

My kids don’t have trouble with fine motor stuff, so it hasn’t been a problem to have them write both math and printing.

I don't think he has real issues with fine motor aside from lack of practice in his younger days. It probably doesn't help that his gross motor is really good. (He's really into baseball and he can hit pitches and throw hard with good accuracy.) He is probably a perfectionist to so it doesn't help him do the fine motor stuff quickly.

4 hours ago, 8filltheheart said:

My kids' progress when they were younger has always been completely erratic and uneven.  Writing plans in advance would have meant having to completely alter them repeatedly.  Sometimes they would master concepts quickly and would make huge leaps and other times they would struggle and would slow way down.

That's my problem too. I've dwindled it down to a weekly plan and I still feel like the record and the plan is a huge mismatch. Winging it though leaves me scrambling to figure out the lesson with my kids staring at me with anticipation.

 

[Not_a_Number]

4 minutes ago, Clarita said:

I don't think he has real issues with fine motor aside from lack of practice in his younger days. It probably doesn't help that his gross motor is really good. (He's really into baseball and he can hit pitches and throw hard with good accuracy.) He is probably a perfectionist to so it doesn't help him do the fine motor stuff quickly.

We also don't have that much writing. Math usually requires writing only like 10 digits, at most. And I leave big spaces for numbers. 

[8filltheheart]

1 minute ago, Clarita said:

t down to a weekly plan and I still feel like the record and the plan is a huge mismatch. Winging it though leaves me scrambling to figure out the lesson with my kids staring at me with anticipation.

 

I'd throw away the plans.  (I have never used plans with my kids. I simply do it myself.)   There are things you can do that don't require massive preparation.  Dominoes are great for math.  You can do counting (writing down the number), addition, subtraction with them.  Cards can be used the same way (including multiplication and fractions) and play war and the person with the highest value wins, etc.  Those activities can be used when you need something to fill the gaps until they are ready for their math book again.

Handwriting is easy to create independently.  Create copywork using sounds that they are struggling with in their reading.  (The blue boy blew glue through the straw.......might not be a sentence you'd find in a workbook, but if those sounds trip up your kids, you can create whatever sentences you want.  🙂 )

[Not_a_Number]

5 minutes ago, Clarita said:

That's my problem too. I've dwindled it down to a weekly plan and I still feel like the record and the plan is a huge mismatch. Winging it though leaves me scrambling to figure out the lesson with my kids staring at me with anticipation.

We basically put one foot in front of the other constantly 🤷‍♀️. I never know the speed my kids will learn something. Like, DD5 wound up needing a YEAR longer on the earliest phonics than DD9 had. And she needed a totally different approach. I would have never been able to plan for that. 

My kids also speed through early math in a way that could never be matched by a program. Right now, DD5 is learning to multiply by 10 🤷‍♀️. I had no particular goals either way: it's just that I have kids both whose parents are mathematicians, and trying to take them through math at the "standard" pace would be very boring for them. 

[Not_a_Number]

1 minute ago, 8filltheheart said:

Handwriting is easy to create independently.  Create copywork using sounds that they are struggling with in their reading.  (The blue boy blew glue through the straw.......might not be a sentence you'd find in a workbook, but if those sounds trip up your kids, you can create whatever sentences you want.  🙂 )

Oh, that is a really good idea. Thank you. Right now, we're just working through HWOT, but I should really do that for DD5, too. She has more trouble with phonics than DD9 and this kind of reinforcement would be stellar for her. 

ETA: I wonder if nonsense words for copywork would be a good idea for her, too? They were so great for her learning to read... 

Edited August 28, 2021 by Not_a_Number

[HomeAgain]

One thing on the writing - we did a lot of writing in a box of salt and writing with chalk at that age.  DS has a lined chalkboard (like the kind they have up near the registers in Michael's right now) and it let him slow down his writing enough to get a good effort out of him.  From there we moved to Smart Start paper, where there were very clear colored lines and I could write beginning point dots.  And that was the other thing - I developed a grouping and sequence of letters for him so that he was always working on previous skills and not forgetting where to start letters.  I couldn't find a handwriting program on the market that did that, so I sat down and started with simplest (l, t, i) and moved outwards.

[Clarita]

1 hour ago, Not_a_Number said:

My kids also speed through early math in a way that could never be matched by a program. Right now, DD5 is learning to multiply by 10 🤷‍♀️. I had no particular goals either way: it's just that I have kids both whose parents are mathematicians, and trying to take them through math at the "standard" pace would be very boring for them. 

My kids speed through science of all things. Mostly because they just ask for more and more of it. I didn't plan on doing that everyday but we end up doing it everyday. 

I actually decided to keep his formal math below his skill because of the fine motor. He'll sometimes make the math in the mathbook we are doing more complicated. (We are working on counting up and down from 10 he'll just do 2's after the official lesson). 

[AnneGG]

My DS is in first grade now, but he has been in OT for years. Handwriting/fine motor is still a struggle. I find that it’s a slippery slope, knowing when to push him and when to relax expectations. I think that gaining wisdom in this area is a large part of the art of teaching. So, I’ve been working to develop that in myself. It’s not going that well but I’m trying. 😂
 

I use Print Path OT from teachers pay teachers. It is very gentle and systematic. You start with uppercase, numbers, then lowercase. All the letters are grouped together with the way you start them. We just wrapped up the “retrace rules” r,n,m,h,b,p. I highly recommend it. When he needs a break from formal handwriting, we focus on drawing lessons from Art Hub for Kids. If he’s not into drawing that day, I’ll let him pick a dot to dot or maze that appeals to him.

[KathrynC97]

On 8/29/2021 at 12:13 PM, AnneGG said:

My DS is in first grade now, but he has been in OT for years. Handwriting/fine motor is still a struggle. I find that it’s a slippery slope, knowing when to push him and when to relax expectations. I think that gaining wisdom in this area is a large part of the art of teaching. So, I’ve been working to develop that in myself. It’s not going that well but I’m trying. 😂
 

I use Print Path OT from teachers pay teachers. It is very gentle and systematic. You start with uppercase, numbers, then lowercase. All the letters are grouped together with the way you start them. We just wrapped up the “retrace rules” r,n,m,h,b,p. I highly recommend it. When he needs a break from formal handwriting, we focus on drawing lessons from Art Hub for Kids. If he’s not into drawing that day, I’ll let him pick a dot to dot or maze that appeals to him.

Teachers pay teachers definitely has lots of good resources for this! There are some good ones on twinkl.com too that I've found useful, especially for fine motor skill development and concentration practice. I think this pencil control activity is free to try? Let me know if it helps!