This is my third and last time that our family will be doing a six-year old kindergarten year. At this point, if you count “nursery” years being when a child is ages three and four, and “kindergarten” years being ages 5 and 6, I have done 12 years of kindergarten planning!

So, with that many years under our belts, it may seem as if there would be nothing new to plan or do but there always is!  Every year is new!   Every year our children are different, each child’s temperament is different, each child’s interests are different.  The rhythm of the year and the seasons remains constant, but each year is new and builds upon that foundation.

If you have a good idea of your seasonal changes and how you and your family feel during the months of the year, your festivals throughout the year and such,  then you are down to picking out stories and song, making up circle times, using fingerplay and foot play and figuring out simple work for each day.

Our  daily rhythm for kindergarten this year will look essentially like this:

• Opening Verse/ Seasonal Songs
• Circle
• Nursery Rhymes with gesture or gross motor movements with rhyme
• Fingerplays and footplays
• Our Story
• Work of the Day.  (We have drawing/cutting/pasting materials out during the Main Lesson time of the older children, so I don’t have a day specifically devoted to drawing.  On Mondays we usually paint or model, Tuesdays we bake, Wednesdays we have handwork/crafting or preparation for some seasonal festival or Feast Day, Thursdays we have a Nature Walk and Fridays are either painting, free play or a field trip day for the older children that my little one gets to tag along upon…Fridays are flexible).
• If there is a special Feast Day related to our religion, then there may be a book for our older children to read to  our kindergartener on that day as well. 

Right now I have everything about the months August through March planned out, except for the stories… I am still in the midst of picking out stories for those months and then I need to go back and finish up April and May.

How is kindergarten planning coming along for you?  Don’t make it too difficult – keep it simple.  In the home environment, simple is best. The rhythm of life  is the kindergarten.

Blessings,
Carrie