Sonlight’s Complete Pre-K Curriculum Makes Pre-K at Home Easy
This post is sponsored by Sonlight. I received compensation for my time and honest review of Sonlight Pre-K Curriculum.
“Mom! Mom! Let’s do my schoolwork!” my little guy exclaims excitedly as he comes running with his picture storybook Bible from our Sonlight Pre-K curriculum. It’s his favorite subject. I snatch him up, give him a cuddle, and then we sit down to snuggle and read. His favorite story right now is about Moses and the Brazen Serpent.
When it comes to homeschool curriculum for pre-kindergarten, I’m rather. . .particular. I truly believe play is best in the formative years, so it’s important to me that a curriculum supports my educational philosophy for pre-k at home. I want a curriculum that is literature-rich because we’re all about books in our house. But I also want one that has plenty of hands-on learning and is not dependent on my child sitting down and doing a plethora of worksheets. Sonlight’s Pre-Kindergarten Package: Exploring God’s World is a perfect fit.
Literature-Rich Pre-K Homeschool Curriculum
From the moment we bring our babies home, we’re reading aloud to them. It’s so important that children have exposure to great literature at all ages. When our kids our little, before they can read on their own, we read several books aloud every day. We even have older kids take a turn reading to younger siblings. Reading aloud is a big part of our everyday.
Books are a great way to help children develop empathy for others, see good morals being modeled, and to learn about the world around them. When we fill our children’s days with good and beautiful books, we are also filling their minds and hearts.
Introducing books at an early age also helps our children to develop a love of reading. I want my children to see me getting lost in a good book. For them to have warm memories snuggled up while we read together. Before they ever learn to read their first word, I want them to experience the joy that comes from a story well told.
The excellent selection of literature found in Sonlight’s Pre-Kindergarten curriculum does a fantastic job of creating a positive experience with reading while you do pre-k at home.
Literature Included with Sonlight Pre-K Package:
- 101 Favorite Stories from the Bible
- People
- Stories from Africa
- Things People Do
- The Gods Must be Angry
- Then and Now
- New Toes for Tia
- First Thousand Words
- Dr. Seuss’s ABC
- American Tall Tales
- The Lion Storyteller Bedtime Book
- Milly-Molly-Mandy Story Book
- Stories from Around the World
- Eric Carle’s Animals Animals
- Children’s Book of Virtues
- A Child’s Book of Art
- Uncle Wiggily’s Story Book
- First Thousand Words in Spanish
- Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is?
- What’s Smaller Than a Pygmy Shrew?
- How Do You Lift a Lion?
- How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World
- Why Do Tigers Have Stripes?
- What’s Under the Sea?
- The Berenstain Bears Big Book of Science and Nature
- The Year at Maple Hill Farm
Hands-On Homeschool Pre-K Activities
Pre-Reading, Pre-Writing, and Pre-Math all encompass hands-on elements. The life skills in the Additional Subjects also include hands-on activities such as learning to wash a cup and bowl, grinding cinnamon sticks, or using scissors.
Since most young children are kinesthetic learners these activities are perfect for helping them learn through exploration.
For math, there are individual beads and ten sticks of beads. The manual suggests getting a piece of felt to use to place the beads on and I highly encourage it as well. I forgot it one lesson and we ended up chasing beads around for most of it. My little guy thought it was great fun and we got to practice counting to make sure we recovered them all. But still, save yourself some trouble and pick up a piece of felt.
My son was so proud of himself whenever he traced the shape for the week. After he’d traced it, he’d exclaim, “I did it!” with a look of pure joy at his accomplishment. He really loved doing math.
Developing the Early Learner Workbooks
Included with the Pre-K curriculum are volumes 1 through 4 of the Developing Early Learner Workbooks by Simone Bibeau. These workbooks are not your typical pre-k workbooks, which I like. The books work on perceptual growth by breaking down the skills needed for reading into subskills and practicing those.
Each book covers four sub-skills: motor, visual, auditory, and comprehension. While working through the books, students will practice skills in:
- L-R Tracking
- Hand-Eye
- Eye Movement
- Mazes
- Patterns
- Similarities
- Memory
- Space Orientation
- Figure Ground
- Rhyming
- Categories
- Sequence
- Language
- Awareness
- Associations
These are all skills that prepare a child for reading.
When we want to learn a skill we need to divide the desired goal into the necessary subskills and learn those first. An example of this is swimming. Children are not just thrown into water. They are taught to float, kick, move their arms, blow bubbles under water and then they swim successfully.
Simone Bibeau
Workbook pages are not every day (maybe once a week) and they do not coincide with the same day students do the letter tracing worksheet. My son likes to do the workbook pages because it makes him feel like he is doing “real schoolwork” like his siblings. I like that they are few and just enough to teach a skill, but not too much that it becomes tedious or excessive. I prefer very few worksheets in my Pre-K homeschool and Sonlight gets it just right.
Short, Sweet, & Complete Done for You Pre-K Homeschool Lessons
Sonlight’s Pre-K homeschool curriculum covers Bible, Literature, History, Math, and Science on a four-day schedule. Each day is broken into Bible, Read-Alouds, Pre-Reading & Writing, Pre-Math, Science, and Additional Subjects. Additional subjects cover the workbooks, Spanish, art, and life skills. Many of these are covered through reading pages from specific books each day.
Each week is clearly laid out for you, with additional information given on a day-to-day breakdown. All you need to do is grab the materials and your child and you are ready to go.
The lessons move at a kid-friendly pace. Children’s attention spans are equal to their age plus one minute. This is the amount of time they can give focused attention to a subject. Sonlight’s lessons fall perfectly into this range.
Personally, I like to spread our subjects out throughout our day. In the morning we’ll do Bible, then the additional subjects. Play for a little while before doing some reading readiness. After lunch, we’ll do pre-math and science. We’ll fit our read-aloud in either during quiet time or save it for our bedtime story. In between all of it, there is plenty of time for play, play, play!
Each subject only takes about 5ish minutes to complete, so I know I am getting his full attention, which means better retention. This makes doing homeschool Pre-K at home easy peasy.
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Sonlight Preschool Curriculum vs. Sonlight Pre-Kindergarten Curriculum
We have used both Sonlight’s Preschool Package: Fiction, Fairy Tales, & Fun and Sonlight’s Pre-Kindergarten Package: Exploring God’s World. Many times we use preschool and pre-k synonymously to mean anything that comes before Kindergarten. However, there are some slight differences between the two.
The easiest difference is age. Preschool is typically for ages 3-4 (or two years before starting Kindergarten) and Pre-K for ages 4-5 (or the year before Kindergarten).
Sonlight Pre-K does build on skills learned in the Preschool curriculum and items, such as the geometric shapes from the preschool box are used in the Pre-K lessons. However, a child who hasn’t done the preschool curriculum and is heading into Kindergarten the following year will be fine starting with Exploring God’s World. I would recommend getting the Preschool box, however, as you do use it. The geometric shapes, practice knife, and scissors are all re-used.
If you need help deciding, then you can reach out to Sonlight’s advisors.
Do Pre-K at Home with Exploring God’s World by Sonlight
If you:
- Know you want to homeschool past Pre-K
- Don’t want to homeschool past Pre-K
- Are looking for a kindergarten readiness program for your upcoming public schooler
- Need something to do with your preschooler during the day
then you should give Sonlight’s Pre-K curriculum a try. Its open-and-go approach is great for busy moms, moms who are unsure how to homeschool pre-K, and moms who like having it all put together in one place. Kids love the hands-on lessons and all the books. You’ll love all the books. Sonlight really makes it easy to confidently do Pre-K at home.
