I apologize in advance for this long post. Thank you to anyone who reads it.
My son turns 4 in June. We’ve been working our way through Easy Peasy’s Getting Ready 1 program. (It’s meant to be a “preschool” level.) He breezed through the letters because he’s known most of them since he was 2 1/2 and we were really just reviewing those before moving on to the second portion of the level anyway.
For those who don’t know, the Getting Ready 1 program has a total of 222 lessons. The first 171 lessons are for learning/practicing the alphabet. After that, the program introduces sight reading with the McGuffey Primer. So far, we have completed the first 11 lessons of the primer, and he is doing really well. I used to teach kindergarten and I am surprised by the number of words he can read already.
He shows a lot of interest in reading, learning, and school in general. Rarely a day goes by when he doesn’t ask if we can have school. Since he’s so young I haven’t stuck to any sort of schedule as far as what days we have school. I let my son decide when we have school; if he wants to have school that day we do, if not we don’t.
Just for the fun of it, I found a Kindergarten Readiness Checklist online. It has a hundred or so tasks listed under a variety of categories and my son is able to do 85% of them. I have been thinking lately about continuing reading with Easy Peasy as we’ve been doing (working at the pace my son sets) but also starting COAH’s K4 curriculum for all the other subjects included in that.
I want to keep school fun for him so that he continues wanting to learn and I don’t want to push him too fast or too early, but at the same time he’s showing a lot of interest in reading and has even shown some apptitude in beginning math (I was looking through the K4 curriculum on my computer and showed him one of the beginning math pages, just to see if he could do it, and he answered all of them correctly). I’d love to hear thoughts and advice from others on how you would handle this. Thank you!
