Focus on Fives || Homeschool Kindergarten Curriculum || BJU Press

hi my name is brie i'm a mom of two one of my girls is almost done with kindergarten this year we did bju press's focus on fives and we did matthew c's primer i will go through matthew c on a different video today's video is going to only be focus on fives and for warning it's gonna be long i'm gonna go in depth so a little bit of housekeeping before i get started if you came here for a specific part of the focus on fives i have figured out how to do the time stamps and the little chapters below so if you want to come here for a specific unit or if you want to look at like what supplies you're going to be needing or what is included i will have them all down below so go ahead and click on those if you just want to look at a specific area otherwise like i said this one's going to be a long one everything i've purchased additionally to the curriculum is listed below in the description box i don't get anything for this this is just for your ease of finding things quickly and if there's something you can find cheaper at walmart or target totally recommend it these are things i found made my life a little easier and even with the curriculum i'll have it all linked below so if you came for a long in-depth look at bgo press's focus on fives continue watching focus on fives is 160 individual day lessons it covers your phonics reading heritage studies handwriting and science in addition to the 160 lessons there is also 20 alternative lessons that you could use for holidays or review after breaks so our journey with focus on fives was a little bit of parent taught and we ended up doing a lot a bit of the distance learning so i'm gonna go through both of those as always with bju i will start with the catalog pricing it is the same as online at the time of recording this video bju is having their summer 10 off sale so i'll link that code below again i don't get anything for that it was just something that came in my email but i do highly recommend going through a consultant because if they have a convention they're attending or if they're doing an event you can get convention pricing and that can get you up to 25 percent off teacher kits or it can get you up to 50 off the video kits so it could be worth it to go through a consultant to save that extra money so with the most current catalog that i have flipping to one of the first pages is the k5 there are three subjects covered with b2u's kindergarten curriculum they have bible math and their focus on fives this year we only use their focus on fives focus on fives parent top kit is 275 dollars and 60 cents included is the teacher edition which are six different unit volumes the student work text reading books for k5 there's 34 of those phonics practice for k5 right now handwriting worksheets phonics charts homeschool packet teaching visuals flip chart and the k5 phonics and review cards and had i got the online video course to start with it would have cost 329 even included in that are the online video lessons student work text reading books the 34 books phonics practice for k5 k5 phonics and review cards student handouts and a video lesson guide and if you wanted additional add-ons would include the teacher volumes phonics charts homeschool packet teaching visuals flip chart and the right now handwriting we took advantage of the 99 sale they have at the beginning of the year for the videos and we've been using those about 80 for our lessons i have taken apart the student work text the phonics practice and the right now handwriting and made them into our own little workbooks so i can't really show you individual workbooks and do a flip through of what comes in then i will later in this video show how i organized them and made their own little workbooks to make sense i'm grateful i did parent taught first because i do think i got more than what i would have gotten with just the online learning but i also gained so much knowledge and grace through doing the online lesson through the teachers so i'm going to go into detail what you get in both and hopefully that'll help you make a decision as to what you as a parent are going to use for your kinder in this coming year one of the things i really like about this is all the units are divided into separate teacher editions each unit has its own theme it has usually a song that goes through the entire unit it's got different characters that are introduced in each unit there's two cumulative reviews each unit that i've noticed each week usually has two phonics stories a review story introduces one to two high frequency words each week they go over many many word families one of the things i really like is everything is included it's all the subjects in one i know in future grades like first and up you purchase the separate subjects and then you arrange your day how you want to do those subjects or some families will pick different curriculum and then use science from one curriculum company and they'll do history from another curriculum company and they'll like like we're using math from a separate curriculum company but this minus math has everything in there on your screen you can see everything that my daughter went through for the first unit and one of the things you might notice are these books the reading books you get cover technically seven units because the seventh unit is those 20 additional lessons that you can do these books are what you would go through once a week no matter what you get these in the parent tot and you get them in the video lessons they are usually about eight pages it starts out really simple where there's literally no words and you're just following along to the prompts that the parent is reading in the parent top book and in the video lessons miss walker is going through them and prompting critical thinking and at the end of the first book they introduced the vic family which is a family that is talked about through all six units and then as they progress through their reading there will be words that they will read the black they read they have two colored words for the compound words and then usually a purple or a blue colored ink word is what the parent reads and i really like how nicely the parent top book spells out what you should say leads prompting questions for critical thinking in the video lessons miss walker does all that on day five she does a review of the words and then she goes into the story and goes into the story gives really good prompting questions encourages the children to look for picture clues and guess what's happening in the story and then has you pause the program while you go through the words with your child and then they go through and they read through it at the end this is one thing my daughter preferred to do with me so when it came to reading stories i read them with her there is one story at the end of every week and it builds upon the vocabulary that they are learning through the entire year the phonics charts and homeschool packet has included in there all the phonics characters these all came on a sheet i laminated and i cut them out included are all the phonics characters they're front and back i laminated them just because my child is rough with stuff and i'm trying to save these for my second child who will be doing kindergarten next year so it came with all the phonics characters which they introduce a couple each unit and they grow upon each other so these are something that they constantly use so if you have the ability to get a laminator or go to staples or office max to get them laminated i highly recommend reinforcing these because these are used every single day get them laminated the phonics characters that they're going to go over is mr and mrs short they have them as a couple here they're always together mr mrs short again they introduce them separately and then you'll be using them a lot uncle short is so mr mrs short and uncle short all have to do with your short vowel sounds and short consonant sounds and then they get later introduced to mrs miss long and miss silent and marked or e when you introduce the long vowel sounds and then you've got which we're on and unit six is bossy r anytime a vowel is accompanied by r the r boss is how the bosses around how the vowel should be saying things and then there's also the mascots you've got dottie bonnie hopper and hopscotch and there's also the splash splash with hopper is something your kids are going to be encouraged to do every day as they go over the high frequency words words that don't quite follow the rules of grammar splash with hopper is one of my daughter's favorite things to do they do put them on popsicle sticks for puppets for them to use to make it more interactive so something you can see it's a little bit bent here i'm going to throw it through the laminator again but i highly recommend reinforcing these ones next up are the word family cards they come on a sheet pre-printed here they are so i cut mine out and then i just they perfectly fit in a pencil box i got from the dollar tree super simple to do they all fit nicely when they're cut out i do know there are other families that just spiral behind the top and they flip them as the word families go i thought it was helpful this way because majority of them are double-sided usually get introduced to the first set first on top of the front side and they add the back side later as you learn more words and word blends so for us it's worked this way to have them where you just kind of pull a chunk out the teacher text is really good about saying what you're going to need for each day and what word families are going to be used so and they're numbered so it's easy just to pull them out for the day i do store them they fit perfectly in a pencil box the phonics song charts are all the individual letters with pictures of what the sound is going to be used in it goes short sounds and then it goes to the the letter blends and then it has songs for the long sounds and then vowel blends there are a ton of these and honestly i don't use these very much because you have the same smaller version of these for the kids with the phonics and review cards so these just kind of sit on my cart all of these are something i think i would benefit from spiral binding for my future use and it shows you some ways that the phonics characters use those sounds in the words next up is the handwriting wall charts i have those on my wall in our kindergarten classroom i would recommend putting them higher than i did as you can see the corners of some of them have been pulled on and yanked on and folded so i did laminate them to reinforce them because it is just regular card stock but it's a great reference for my daughter to use when we're doing handwriting on letters so she can refer back to and it's also a quick little prompt for the sound of that letter next are the spelling cards and honestly i can't remember if these were pre-cut like this or if they came in sheets and i cut them but they show the letter capital and lowercase how they were introduced and these when i got them i kind of put them to the side and i forgot about them but these are great for introducing new words when you're changing out the first letter or it's a great activity that they definitely do in the videos where you have words that start the same but the ending is different so you look okay which letter are we changing to change this word to that word and this is a great little thing to incorporate with spelling games so i use this a lot more now than i did when i was on my own and i use a little clippy just to keep them all together otherwise they will be all over my house and last but not least in this little packet is the phonics charts these you can see at the very bottom corner you'll start using lesson 43 then less than 111 then lesson 121 then lesson 122 lesson 128 in lesson 136 so these are more utilized when they're introducing phonics characters and on the back will be a story that goes along with the phonics character and what they're doing these are great little visuals i personally only used the first one because when we did lesson 43 i was still personally teaching it but since then we have been doing the online videos and this is just shown already on the online video portion this is not included in the video packet i know the reinforced little versions of the characters and stuff aren't included however online they have all of this stuff printable through the portal so you can go through and print off to your heart's content on card stock of your own and reinforce it but they also have in the student textbooks the cutout pages where they make their own puppets so they can have their own little versions of the characters so for those of you who are going to be choosing to do the online or the video lessons don't fret that you don't have the word families or the characters or the individual letters because these are all things that she goes over in the lessons online the one thing i love from this specific packet are the individual letters but this is something you could recreate on your own with just flash cards next thing included in the parent top kit is the teaching visuals flip chart again this is not included in the online videos because this is shown through the lessons and secretly i like the online lessons better for this because they go through a lot more the visuals homeschool flip chart is used mostly for the heritage studies and the science lessons but there are some other things that are used in here for they've introduced the biblical worldview theme there are two main families that they talk about throughout the six units and then there is their town which i ended up cutting one of the pages and tapings but this is something that if you're doing parent taught you definitely need some of the science and heritage studies lessons i would use as a starting point for references and then you can get on your computer and show more and there's actually i'll link it down below but it talks about it in the book too but there's there's teacheronlinetools.com i think i'll put it right here it's something that bg you press put together and you go to the grade k the k5 grade and there's other resources that they do use in the online lessons to show more into the heritage studies and science curriculum for reference but this is this is worth its weight in gold if you're doing parent taught for example we were one of the units they talk about animals and they have the pine hill zoo which is pine hill is where the main characters that you see through all six units they live and then you would have pine hill do and then on the back is what you're going to read about for that lesson for lesson 66 68 69 my only gripe is these pages are very thin and if i want to if i want to read i have to do like this to show my daughter the picture and read the back so it's very see-through and i mean she can see it just fine but i'm doing something like this and you can see i look crazy that's my only great so this is something i definitely was happy to put down when we started doing the online lessons because she gets to sit and watch the lesson and it's great one thing that's not included in the online or dvd course is the right now worksheet and it honestly makes me kind of sad because i love these worksheets basically it's just extra handwriting practice it's about a half a page in unit six you're doing a whole entire sentence you're writing your sentence you're tracing here you're writing it on your own doing your period extra practice writing your name and then they have the opportunity to color and it's something that i think has paid for itself because bg used handwriting is like a hybrid denalian it's precursive so it's not what you would get if you got like a scholastic book for instance their lowercase f drops below the bottom line before you stop because it's getting them ready for when they get into cursive they're going to go down and go over or their m's and their ends and their w's they're all the rounded versions instead of the pointy versions their uppercase e is a backwards three it's not a line and three more lines so this has been very beneficial for my daughter to have that extra bit of practice and they also include in there for a parent reference each letter has a description of how you would write the letter so that's really helpful to have too when you're doing the handwriting and i just love that that right now has the opportunity it's literally just a half page it's real short you saw it's only a line and for letters it's usually you're writing a letter like five or six times when they're introducing letters i think it's very beneficial to do that so i will link that below it'll be in all caps right now and i'll give a link directly to that it's only 10 and 28 cents and last but not least included in the parent top kit or the phonics and review card i just have the little scrapbook card organizational holder thing that i picked up at walmart they fit perfectly in there they're exactly the same as what you'd be getting in the phonics song charts the big ones i showed you except they're smaller and these are included in the online version and the video version and these i prefer they're compact they're smaller they also include the high frequency words so these are great to have and they include big versions of the high frequency words so you have a little itty bitty version that we're doing our long vowels right now and on the back would be a small so it also becomes like a little miniature spelling card too if you don't have these ones you have these but it's only lowercase this has both upper and lower case so these are great my daughter loves these mrs r in the online video uses these a lot for when they're identifying sounds you hold up the card if you hear it put it down to mine um they get a little bit bent we had a little conversation about how we're supposed to treat our our cards so they can last longer but these i love these we use these every single day one little tip for organization everything is color coordinated and i didn't realize this until probably unit four also hidden in these phonics and review cards are some of the characters there's little cards there's dottie and hopper and the splash and hopscotch and bonnie and there is one more but i lost her she's somewhere in our house or she's been eaten by a dog kind of going towards being eaten by a dog these are great to use because when they mention hopscotch you can have a little hopscotch card or when you have hopper and splash or what you're going to use for your splash words you would have hopper on one side you put your high frequency words in the middle and your kid kind of hops them along until you get to the splash part so this is a great extra practice dottie is what they use for reading for teaching kids how to use a bookmarking track of where they're reading and then bonnie is used anytime a song is used or at least uses a bookmark so these are just extra little little characters you can always use too if one of your characters goes missing from the puppet pile so to get into the nitty-gritty of the phonics practice book pages and the student work textbooks you kind of have to get into how the lessons are structured the work text page is one page back in front and then there's a phonics practice page that comes next back in front the first part of the work text page is going to be related to what was gone over in science or heritage studies and then the back half of the work text page does some handwriting practice so for those video viewers that's where you're getting your handwriting practice and then there's a little bit of a reading review and then you would go into the phonics practice page that corresponds with the lesson back in front and that usually reflects the letter sounds and the letter blends in the reading portion of what they just learned in that lesson so for mock lesson this is lesson 22 they're talking about teeth there's a little bit of a review at the beginning you would talk about what you went over the day before and then it says here on the left materials and preparation what you're gonna need for that science lesson and it says visual 12 which is what you would be pulling out the visuals flip chart book for online people you don't do that and then you would go through the display of the visual and you talk about brushing your teeth or whatever the back of that page prompts you to say and you have a discussion that's led by what the book says and then you would get to that first side of the work text page it says up here on the bait on the book work text page 37 and then it shows you the answers of what that is and then it immediately tells you go into language arts for this specific thing on the left it has your materials where it says you're gonna need your stick puppet for hopscotch and the materials and then you get onto the next page again what's gonna be needed this is where i was talking about earlier where you have your phonics charts and then your word family words here on this specific lesson they were talking about the n the s the and the at words so it says right here the letter and the number on the cards that you would pull out for that day and then the stick but bonnie and then your letter review cards like those big charts i was telling you that i don't use you can use those little ones for that because that's what we ended up using a lot more and then you go into your grammar and introducing new word sounds and word blends and then there's a story in this specific lesson they're talking about punctuation the phonics stories are in the back of the phonics practice book you tear them out and i think i remember correctly you would cut it in half and you fold it they're four page stories that very much go over what the kids have just learned that week or that day there's two phonics stories per week right down here they practice writing their name i think if i remember correctly it was two to a page and it has the cut line you cut and then just fold it over and that's what you would pull for that specific day they're introducing the uppercase e so you've got to practice the uppercases so the back side of the work text page is generally an introduction to the handwriting and practice by handwriting and application with handwriting and then there was a review and then there's the phonics practice pages that came from a separate book and then at the end of the lesson it has an extended activities page if you want to do additional story rhyme time is every few days that usually has a list of additional stories that you can read that kind of goes with the theme of what you're talking about parent taught has this right now worksheet that's an extended activity for the parent taught lesson of the day and then usually there's arts and crafts not every day but they do include arts and crafts there's learning centers that i did diligently do for the first unit and then honestly i kind of stopped after a while and then there's motor skills so if you want to incorporate some kind of early ed pe you can't there's options for that there's extra science projects and i really love that biblical worldview they usually have a bible connection or a bible story once at least once a week they do have integrated through the lessons but if you want to do additional bible lessons with your day you can they have them in there and then there's songs at the beginning of each book there's a contents page they spent a lot of time in the in the contents of the beginning going over the first like 20 pages that way you can understand how they would like you to structure the teaching of these lessons to the benefit of your child and then the back are the teacher resources so it talks about the goals and then it kind of goes over why they're teaching the way that they do and how they utilize phonics characters and how they use adaptive handwriting of precursive you can read that a little bit to really understand why they really focus on pencil hold and the the structure in which they form their letters then they also have a composition about once or twice a week they do a composition paper which in parent tot is found at the back that you can photocopy but what i did i purchased these little notebooks that you can get from walmart where basically the top half is blank and then the bottom half is the dotted line my sister is a teacher so she used this when she was teaching kindergarten because they did composition and it's great to see how i started by writing and that's her handwriting last year and then towards the end she wrote these sentences all by herself so it's great to have a reference back to to see just how she's grown in her handwriting and in her drawing but i can tell you they do not do the entire notebooks worth of composition so if you have a photocopier you can photocopy from my experience i would lighten it like at least one when you're going to copy because these are thin papers so you can see the bleed through so if you lighten it by one it should be okay then it explains why they have a biblical world view and how everything we do in learning has is to the glory of god which i love and then it gets into the nitty-gritty of how these pages are set up i highly recommend spending time reading all of this it's got tips and tricks and you really want to know what this is trying to help you like this is here to help you these are your two favorite pages it really tells you how to start what to read what you're going to need the overview the order in which they do stuff very helpful next it goes over the instructional materials and then it goes into how you prep the materials to be ready for your year if you're doing multiple subjects it kind of gives you a little bit of a layout how they recommend teaching this course personally for my kid it takes about an hour start to finish for this not including math this material was originally created for private christian schools so some of the stuff in here is geared towards a class so if you're curious how this we taught in the classroom it does go into detail how a classroom teacher is recommended to use it and then evaluation and assessment pages it tells you what they do for evaluation of assessment in kindergarten they don't really encourage tests so much for a grade but these are really utilized to see where your student is at and if they need additional help if we need to take a pause and work on a section a little bit longer at the end of each week there's a review for you worksheets one it's one page back in front and that's just a review of what they went over in the week so you can use that as a weekly assessment to see how they're taking in the knowledge from that week at the end of each unit there is a let's check pages which goes over what was specifically taught in that unit and then there are checkup stations one to two per unit that's a cumulative review that's that goes from the beginning of what they learn to the present what they're at for example this is the end of unit one i was showing you unit one book so this is our end of unit one this was the review for you for the end of this week on the last week of unit one it was very simple i do the reviews with my daughter at the beginning i really had to sit there and emphasize sounds and letter formations and she really did need the additional help so that's why we really took advantage of knowing where she was and slowing down and taking time and doing more of those extended activities at the end of each day you can see where it teaches them how to bubble in and on this specific one she was identifying some letters that she had learned so she was pairing up the uppercase and lowercase letters for this one and then she had the end of the unit let's check is once again she's learning how to bubble so she's learning standardized tests she's identifying the sentence that matches the picture and then here she's identifying the beginning sound of the picture and at the end of this unit she had one cumulative review so once again here mark the beginning letter of each picture so she did that we worked on bubbling identifying beginning sounds and matching the word with the picture and these are just things if she struggled we would pause and go back and you can see here her handwriting wasn't the best here but that's why i'm really grateful for the right now workbook because when i show you where we're at right now you're gonna see an immense difference and i really do credit that to those extra practice that she got so if we were to compare to her most recent unit that she completed again at the end of that specific week she had a review for you which i have now not been sitting there doing with her now we're doing full sentences and she's identifying the sentence that matches the picture so this is very common for the reviews and then her let's check which is a unit i guess you can call assessment or review these are all words that she learned in this unit and she was able to on her own go through and i encouraged her for these kinds of things if she needs help i'm there to help her but she confidently did these by herself and then here is the checkup station so this is one of the cumulative reviews so she is identifying at this point she's identifying the vowel sound but she's identifying if it's a long vowel or a short vowel and then here she's matching the word to the picture and then this i think is very important to mention because this is the number one thing that i've seen all parents including myself get confused on in the back of each parent textbook it has these checkup station assessments and basically you can see here's a tree so the way you would do this type of question page you say point to the tree she'd point to the tree and that's the number that's the number she's on so you point to the tree and i would say listen to your teacher mark the circle next to the word they so these are all high frequency words that she knows so basically she's listening to the word i'm telling her to and marking the correct word but the the confusing part is they use pictures or some or familiar symbols instead of saying go to number one and listen to me that was something i had a little bit of a learning curve on and then you can see bigger words for her on that and then identifying the sentence that matches the picture so there's a huge difference from unit one where she's just learning letters to unit 5 where she's doing complete sentences so that's the assessments again we're going to put little quotes on assessments so that's how they do assessments it's really a tool for seeing where your student is at and utilizing that information to decide whether to continue on or take a pause and work on where your kid might need some more help and practice next the overview talks about the reading book goals these are utilized at the end of every week's lesson there's 34 books two which are used for the unit review for unit 7 which are the additional 20 lessons that are standalone lessons that you can use for review or you can use for holidays so these are great i really like how it gives an example of how they use these books the importance of using them the importance of using these at the end of each week really just solidifies what they've been learning that week and it really helps build their confidence in what they're reading and it's really goes into detail how to use it each book ends with some phonics review words and then it has a couple splash words that they can go and it has it has some splash words that they can review too at the very end of the lesson now speaking on likes versus dislikes i love these books i think they're adorable the graphics are so cute they're very colorful i like how clear and concise they tell you what to do like this is the title page and the blue is what you're going to be saying and then it has what your child will be seeing in their book so you get to read you read the blue and then the black lettering is information that you'll need to give instructions and then the red lettering is what an expectation of what you want you're expecting your child to say or you're going to guide them to that point i think the graphics are so cute i love that it's basically idiot proof it tells you what to say how to say it where to say it when to say it and what i especially like is when you get to this section of any of the units any week so these gears are really the critical thinking questions they're encouraging your student to think for themselves and use some picture clues and make some inferences however my daughter does not like these stories i don't know why you can see over my shoulder i have a ton of books so what we've been doing instead is i got a bunch of these i can read books i have learned from these instructions that i use those same skills i see that they have laid out in black and white and blue and red or their books i'm using the same concept for these other books and i really have enjoyed seeing my daughter's confidence in reading grow through this program and seeing them in books other than what's geared towards her curriculum one of the things i like about the books is it does not have your child read a word that they have not learned yet and that's where i think it's such a great way for them to gain confidence because there's the words that you as a parent are going to read and then all the other words they should know and they should have learned and then my daughter's just so proud of herself and she's like i know these words i read a story by myself it's the sweetest thing i just i wish that she liked them more so the next thing that it goes over in the overview is teaching tips and tools and this is so helpful it talks about how to use the visuals the instructional aids it shows you how to use the reading marker with the phonics and review cards that are in there here you go this is the one we lost so it told you how to use them how how to practice tracking and how to identify words and using the instructions and then it goes into the lesson plan overview each unit has a theme and within each unit each week has like a mini theme so this just goes overview it says it'll say what lesson you're on and they'll say what pages you and the teacher edition are on what work text pages you're going to go over which the phonics practice pages you're going to use and then what the objectives are that you will be learning or teaching your child and then it gives you an intro into how that first week's gonna go the first week of unit one really just solidifies a classroom setting it's really it was really easy it just gets them a note very softly gets them into the practice of learning for the online video course student handouts and video lesson guide are different than what i would be getting in the parent teacher kit i love these lesson plan overviews because it shows again what you need what's coming up how long each lesson is so the student handouts are pre-printed anything you would have copied out of the back of the book that they're doing in a lesson is already printed for you and they send it three-hole punch you know i would have liked to have this stuff to stick in with their lessons instead of copying and another benefit to the doing the distance learning is you can print off everything all the worksheets in the back are printable off the website so i don't have to worry about lightening my copier so it doesn't have the bleed through it prints off perfectly so there's no spiral in the picture when it prints off it's a lot nicer it's a lot more printer friendly a lot more user friendly there is a learning curve to figure out where everything is but it's all there the teachers your child will meet in the distance learning are misses are she's the main teacher she teaches about 90 i would say of the lessons then mrs walker is always the friday or day five teacher for the reading and then scattered in there is also mrs gillenwater who does the science lab mr gabe does the workshop where he does the bible studies lessons here and there and mrs nelson does the make it studio which are the art projects which my daughter loves so the way that the videos are structured is there's two videos per day so there's two lessons and the first lesson is either science or heritage studies which is 7 to 15 minutes science can sometimes be 20 depending on what the activity they're doing and then it goes into the literature language art lesson which can be anywhere from 25 to 35 minutes so total about an hour is what these videos last i don't just push play and walk away and i want to make sure she's paying attention when my daughter is watching so i will pause the video when they're introducing new word sounds new word blends especially when they do splash with hopper i definitely pause so she can see each word and then she reads it and then i'll unpause it and mrs r goes and says the word and then we work through it the way i do it takes a little bit longer but generally the order they do it in is the same order you would see in the teacher edition where you have your science or history lesson and then you have your literature lesson and then you learn like the brunt of the words you're learning you read the little story and then afterwards you do your first worksheet and then sometimes you go straight into your second worksheet so me thinking that this whole time i would just pause because my daughter prefers that i read the stories with her so we would read the story and i just i just turned the lesson off and i would do the worksheets after that but every once in a while there's an additional practice time in there where they do some additional phonics practice every once in a while there's a make it studio every once in a while there's a mr gabe's workshop with the bible lesson and that's one of my little pet peeves about the online learning is the lesson over you view that's provided to you in your packet does not say who's teaching it online it'll say sometimes if mrs gillenwater is going to be doing a science lab and they'll say sometimes that gabe is going to be there for gabe's workshop it will let you know when there's going to be a make it studio art project so those are good to have with the list of materials needed and i don't know if these two specific things are accessible if you only have the teacher edition i think these are great i love it because just like the overview you would find in the beginning of the book it says says what the lesson is it says the minutes that each lesson is how long it is and then it said what the work text and the phonics practice pages are right there and then i also for it said assignment i always say what the new words are and what character we're learning about that week so i can just give myself a heads up and then i'll circle when there's a creative writing assignment so i know for me to pull out this notebook so i know how to do it so getting into the specific units there are six units unit one is called all around the town and it really covers people you meet in a community week one is the intro it introduced the the vic family that's moving to a town so they learn about moving they talk about meeting new people week two talks about firefighters and this is a good point to say that they do art lessons throughout the unit this is one of the art projects my daughter did for week two she mixed yellow and red paint and made fire and she did a cut out page so it was very simple very age-appropriate but when they did the fire week they did this week three they talked about police officers so she was able to she talked to my uncle and about being a police officer and she got to make a little hat a police officer hat week four they talked about post office workers and on week five they talked about health care workers which kind of went into talking about how we clean ourselves and staying healthy and eating healthy so that was a fun little science week we had and each unit has a little overview for the teacher to know what it's going to be about and it matches the parent letter that i actually made the covers of each of my unit books for my kid but i also like that these units have unit songs so they learn the song that goes with the theme of their unit so the unit songs for unit one was there was a song about hopscotch which is kind of a kindergarten intro song so she learned about the character hopscotch which she's gonna utilize and learn with the entire kindergarten time and then there was the friends around town which was each verse was added each week they met a new community helper so you would sing that verse when you did that week's character and then at the back of the book since we're talking about songs the back of the book is also where you would find the phonics songs that are mentioned in there phonics 2 is later when they start doing the long vowel sounds but the short vowel sounds and the short blend sounds are in the back where it's sonic songs and then it has the other songs that will also be introduced later in different units i should mention that there is not a cd with songs for any of the sheet music to go with you can go online and they have it where they have it pre-recorded for free to listen to but it's just the musical background accompaniment it's not someone singing it so that is a benefit of having the online distance learning or the video lesson is you do have someone singing those words so if you can read sheet music and you can kind of pick out the notes to get the tune luckily i grew up playing an instrument my husband plays an instrument i'm just not a good singer so my daughter struggled for a while listening to me it's okay it was a blessing when we did the distance learning for the music part of it because now she sings along with those music people and they sound wonderful and beautiful unit 2 bookshelf friends it's all about books and authors and the different kind of books that there are so week six was we talked about bibles and hymns week seven we talk about the library and this would have been a perfect opportunity for a field trip to the library but unfortunately i taught my daughter during the pandemic so it was closed week 8 was nursery rhymes week 9 was learning about picture books week 10 she learned about fairy tales week 11 she learned about books that teach the learning books crossword puzzle word cert the ones where you do mazes so she got to make her own learning book that week and that's found in the back of the book in the instructional aids and all of that is mentioned in each of the lesson or reviews where it shows you what you're going to need for that week i don't always do all the instructional aids that are mentioned or are in the back of the book because some of these instructional aids are used for resource centers if you were in a classroom i did for the first unit go crazy and copy everything and cut out everything and laminate everything and then it's great for extra practice but that's where when the assessments come in if my daughter needed some extra practice then i would go and look at the specific lesson that she was struggling on and see if there was some additional help we could get from the back of the book so the song for unit 2 is time to read it's really cute it's really short my daughter loves it even to this day when we're in unit 6 you know almost done with school she still sings it every time we get to the story section of our week unit 3 was entitled ants to elephants and i think that this unit specifically was my daughter's favorite unit so in unit three ants to elephants week one which would be week 12 in the school year was bible animals that talked about you know sheep and donkeys and lions and it did a really good job tying it into the bible stories that went with it and this unit also had a lot of science so shout out to mrs gillenwater if my daughter loves you week 13 was insects this was the week i hated this was the week my daughter loved she loves insects mrs gillenwater did some really cool science lessons on bugs and spiders and it didn't quite match up 100 with what the parent top thing did but my daughter loved it and absorbed every minute of it and then my mom as a reward bought my daughter a bunch of toy spiders which i keep finding around my house and we'll just say that i'm not very appreciative of where i'm finding them week 14 is wild animals so a lot of the animals of where you would find at the zoo they really talk about animals that you'd find in the zoo where where they are from in the wild so that was fun for her to learn about week 15 was animals by the pond it talked about frogs and turtles and other animals you would find in a pond and then the final week of aunts to elephants was week 16 it was about farm animals and the unit songs for unit 3 were god made the animals and i'm glad that he made you and something to note about this is a huge difference between this and the the video lessons is this song they sing the songs in the video lesson but this specific song god made the animals it goes with a little book i think it came in the phonics practice pages it's towards the end and you just split them in half you're basically making half page coloring pages that have the animals as they're introduced and on the other side is the next verse for the next animal so at the end in the extended activities for this unit there was god made the animal's booklet so they're making a booklet that goes with the verse so it says sing the verse about lions and instruct the student to color the page so by the time we went through the entire unit she has somewhere in this house that book with all of the animals watching the videos they don't mention this book at all they do sing the song they do show the animals they have a cute little cartoon that goes with it but for those of you that find those at the end of i think it was the phonics practice or the work text it's in one of those two books you find these extra pictures that's what it goes so what i did with those since i wasn't teaching this part as they on the tv were doing that part of the animal going through the song i would have her color it during the lesson so she would sit and be quiet when they're learning about that animal this was also the unit my daughter liked doing a lot of the art projects one of them we lost an eye but one of them we did this was actually a combo art creative writing page i photocopied this from the back and then you make a lion face you cut it out and color it and glue it and also at the back of the book are all the creative writing pages and you would copy this part and she would say my line is and we would glue that to the back and we also did for the insect week she made a little ladybug puppet so unit four was mountains high to ocean deep so it was very much about geography overview of what each week would be school week 17 unit for week one is they talk all about mountains week 18 is about the prairie and my daughter asked me if we live on the prairie because one of their coloring pages that they did was a prairie dog and we have like these little prairie gopher things that pop up in our yard events while so my daughter thought we lived on a prairie week 19 is rivers and lakes so they were started talking about bodies of water week 20 was about oceans and then week 21 was taking the gospel more about bible so i was talking about missionary work and where they would do missionary work in other countries so that was really cool for her to be exposed to that and then week 22 was america the beautiful and it talked about different places people visit in the united states such as hawaii the grand canyon different caverns caves going to alaska learned about volcanoes so that was the last week was very exciting for her she she really did enjoy this unit about different places to live the unit songs were america land that i love and this so far is my favorite song that they've done and then count the stars was the song that they did the week they talked about missionaries so that was a cute little segue song i don't think i mentioned this but each week has a snack of the week and i'm not good at doing the snacks of the week and apparently trail mix was the mountains week and that would have been very easy because i have a lot of trail mix at my house unit 5 the one we just finished was blue skies and gray so it really did a great overview on the weather week 23 for school week 1 for unit 5 was looking at the season so we talked about the seasons and week 24 was weather watching which they talked about tracking the weather and i got to show her all my fun little weather apps i have on my phone and this is where there's a lot of good stuff in the back where you can make your own calendar and your own weather book and at one point we even made her a little meteorologist and we did a weather report so that was fun week 25 was talking about the seasons the different seasons and then week 26 was dressing for the season which made me laugh hysterically because focus on fives is taped on the east coast and i live on the west coast so when they were trying to identify what to wear for specific seasons my daughter couldn't identify with what they were identifying with like it does not snow where we live so when they're saying what do you wear in the winter she's like shorts and a t-shirt so that was a way that i got to um explain to her that where different people live they wear different things it was just it was just funny because she could not compute like why would i wear that much clothing when it's 90 degrees outside and then week 27 for for unit 5 is animals through the season so that whole week she got to learn about how animals act different during different parts of the seasons and then last but certainly not least the current unit we are almost done with is garden paths and wandering trails which is all about plants and warm seasony spring type stuff so in week 28 of unit six it's it was about where jesus walks so we really got to have a good heritage historical look at the difference between bible times and current times they really looked at what the dwellings of bible people lived in compared to what we live in they talked about the clothing that they wore the type of food they ate the transportation they had week 29 was in the garden so we're really talking about planting plants and it's perfect for this time of year because i do have a garden and she has helped me plant so she's really identifying with the the plants that are growing so she's learning about you know on a kindergarten level about how things grow week 30 was yesterday's trails talks about people who discovered america and starts going into the american flag and our american history week 31 is talking about deserts and then week 32 the final week will be vacation travel so it's kind of wrapping everything up it's a lot of review and then it talks about places you can travel on vacation and then unit 7 is actually in the unit 6 workbook it's the additional 20 standalone lessons that you would do for holidays or after winter break or after spring break at some additional review lessons and halfway through this is where they kind of say what the lessons are and i just put dates next to it for a reference christmas is an additional week they have a few for easter they've got some for martin luther king groundhog's day valentine's day president's day memorial day just passed so we got to do that one all the way from labor day all the way to memorial day is the additional lessons they have there's also two books that are integrated and there's one on colors and i think there's a christmas book in there too this is where we did the pilgrims we talked about there's a pilgrim story in here so i was able to read them for thanksgiving we did the pilgrim story about how people came to settle here so there you go that's a quick overview of all six units technically seven and how it's presented in terms of the parent top books i have said it and i'll say it again i love these books and i think they're worth their weight in gold one of the most common questions i get is how do you organize all of this stuff that you get i think the way i started and the way i planned everything off of it was based off of making unit books for my daughter and i'm gonna try to explain this as easily as i possibly can this kind of is gonna be an organization set up i guess i mentioned earlier everything is color coded with the stories that they read the backs are all different colors so this is red this is orange this is purple this is blue and then there's also yellow red is unit five so basically what i did to organize my material is i got all my little books cut in half and i had them in a pile i got my handwriting pages all cut up in a pile i had my work text pages all tore off in a pile and then i had my phonics practice pages all out and in a pile in order and as it was presented to me as in the teacher text that is exactly what i started my book with so the parent letter works perfect for a cover page and then this is the first worksheet you can see the first worksheet is there it is a phonics practice page and so that was my first worksheet as i would go through the parent textbook or the teacher textbook when i get to a page where it shows what she's doing she's on that page and then i would go through the lesson and then the next story she's going to read i put that in my textbooks that says this is what she's doing and i didn't want to poke holes in those little stories so i fold it in half she writes her name on it and then we read it together and then after the story's done she's got her next side of her worksheet for her work text page 238 she should open up to what we're doing next and then after we finish that worksheet i turn the page in my book and the next worksheet i see should be the next worksheet she sees and then i had other little doodads that didn't quite go in the lesson plan because it showed up anything in the extended activity that would stick in here and then you can see it ends with a back here in the corner is the right now worksheet in simple terms whatever i saw on my page she was seeing the student version on hers and then at the end of the week it will have the review for you so we do review and then we do the review worksheet and then this specific week she's going to have a checkup station which is a cumulative review so i usually use that at the end after we do stories it's just giving me a heads up like hey review time because the answers to that as i spoke before in the back of the book but i have the story we're gonna read matching up with the story that i'm instructing her on so i just have it there with each page that she sees in the book i see here and then what i also do since we're doing distance learning right now is i have the lesson plan overview for the distance learning printed off and i have the materials list printed off and i just check off per day and write down what we did and that is actually my placeholder for where we are currently learning so i have my little spot here i turn to that page i know what we're going to need with the overview i'm like well here's the materials that i'm going to need for the day and then these are what the handouts we're going to need and it looks like we're going to have a creative writing page which i know is in the back of the book so i can make a copy or had i done distance learning from the beginning i would have had those worksheets in there as well if i have to go somewhere unexpected and i still need to do school with her i just grab my book she grabs hers and we have the bare minimum of what's needed she has her weekly stories that she's going to need i have my instruction if i have to i do comb binding a lot of other people do the spiral binding which the unit books are spiral bound but at the time of buying this i didn't have the budget to get a spiral binder they are a little bit more pricey than what i got i got this monster it's a fellows comb binder i'll have it linked below i got it off at amazon it's affordable i like it a lot it has a punch so it punches the little holes it has the different size combs that you can fit so when we got all the pages together they have a little jig you can stick it into to see what size comb you need with the phonics practice pages the parent letter really made a good cover i got a clear cover page for it so you can see it and i just use yellow cardstock as the back cover you can be as fancy as you want they do have harder material that you can use but this for me it worked it was from it's for a kindergartner so i wasn't getting too fancy one of the major downfalls to comb binding is it's not continuous like spiral so the little clippy thing sometimes pops out and it's easy enough just to pop it back in things sometimes tear you can see down here at the end it's kind of gotten worn down but i think that's normal wear and tear for any method of binding things together and then another thing that is a plus to spiral binding but a downside to comb binding is with comb binding it's harder to fold it over my daughter still makes it work but if you want to have it where it's only one page it's harder to do i do know a lot of people have their own spiral binders and to me the the expense at the time was just too much for me to invest in that especially in the curriculum that i was just trying out this would be like my practice curriculum are we gonna homeschool or not so i was trying to keep costs low if you have other homeschool families near you maybe if you have a co-op or something it would be a really good opportunity if you guys all kind of went in on a spiral binder and had like a spiral party and just found your books one week or something because they can be pricey bju uses plastic spirals but i know you can also buy metal spirals one of the complaints i have about spiral binding is you can see here where it keeps popping out so i've got to re-feed it through one way i've seen some families combat that is they take beads and they'll hot glue a bead to the end which is a really good idea so besides beat at the end hot glued on will keep that from coming out but i do like a big pluses you can just fold it over so you don't have this huge long thing going out i've seen a lot of other moms they do a weekly folder method which is something i tried for preschool and i know for my family just doesn't work to try to plan it out by the week because we have some weird schedules in this family kind of the same concept where you lay everything out but then you just gonna pull it out by week and stick it in a folder and you would give your kid what they need for that week and then some people do it by day another question people have is like how do you keep records so in my state kindergarten is technically not a required grade and bgu as a whole doesn't really encourage grades for the lower elementary grades they just want to make sure the child is getting the concept my state is actually really lenient on homeschooling families we declare that we're going to home school at six years old and then we're on our own we basically as parents are committing to doing the basic reading writing arithmetic science history and they don't there's no kind of follow up but since i am a product of a public school environment i do like a record keeping and i think that the comb binding has made it easy i have six books with all of my daughter's work in addition i have two math bound books too but i have basically in total eight books that have all of her kindergarten work so if at any point i'm questioned with what did she learn i can be like here is her work and you can see easily from book one to book six the immense improvement that she's made so record keeping for me is super simple i'll hold on to this probably for a few years until it becomes too much i really like this i'm going to use it as a reference for when i teach my second daughter kindergarten in a couple years i do think as far as record keeping this is the easiest way i've got in order how she learned it it has the assessments that she's done and at the very end of each unit is her last unit test which is a cumulative exam so it shows really well how she did so for storage what i've been doing is i have these cheapy little magazine organizers this is for unit one and two i think i mentioned before in unit one i laminated and cut out everything to save so it'll be easier for my second kid but these fit in here so basically two parent books and two kid books and then whatever supplements i added go in the box and i have all of my teacher books and all of the kid books and three of these and then in one more magazine box is all the additional materials that i have and four of these is everything i have some shelves above me and before recording this video i had moved all of these boxes from the ikea storage cubes i've been using to hold it to up there so you know you can put it on a shelf it doesn't take much room it's very low profile but what i'm actually probably gonna do is i'm gonna get one of those plastic totes and i'll probably put them in like this label it kinder unit one and two and so on and so on and i'm gonna put it under my stairs until my second daughter is ready for kindergarten and i will have this as a reference and i'll have some stuff pre-prepped and then i'm also going to include in that box what i'm going to have to purchase which would be the right now book the phonics practice and the student work text so i don't need to buy three more consumable materials for this curriculum so i guess this is as good a time as any to talk about schedule personally for me i do a four day schedule we do our days a little bit different because my daughter really loves the science and heritage studies lessons and because of the way that i organize the book when she finishes a lesson she turns her page and she sees like a cutout page for heritage studies or a science something and she wants to do that so looking at unit six the week that we're on right now day one we did three lessons because we did the heritage studies lesson we did the english lesson and then she saw that there was a heritage studies lesson so she did the heritage studies lesson for the next day and that kind of starts us on our next day's path so day two was we did the english lesson from day two and the science lesson from day three then our day three hour day three as we did the english lesson from day three and the the heritage studies lesson from day four and then our day four is usually the english lesson which starts kind of a review and then we do the review and the story for day five we combine it all and then she ends up doing like the next day's heritage studies or science lesson on fridays usually i'll have her week review and then me and her will read the story together so it becomes instead of a 30 minute lesson ends up being like 10 so she just continues on our weeks are kind of structured into four day weeks so i'm not a monday through friday person my husband work schedule constantly changes so it's really worked as a benefit too because of homeschooling we can be really flexible about our scheduling one thing i really wish i had known about bgu press before i started was that bjupress is not a mastery course your child can continue on if they haven't mastered all the it words i remember when i first started teaching her from the parent taught perspective i got so frustrated because she would get stuck and she was having trouble adding a letter at the beginning to the it sound and she was struggling and i thought you had to master this and then i realized all these words cycle back they they build upon each other they have a lot of exposure to it and then when i started watching the video lessons i got a little bit of grace instilled upon me when mrs r was like it's okay if you don't know the words right away mrs walker also said you don't have to know all of the words you sometimes you know mom or dad can read the words you know so it's okay to not have these mastered these all of these words are gonna be gone over again in first grade so this is just introducing your child to the love of learning getting some of those basics in it's amazing to see how my daughter started from learning a letter and a sound and writing the letter to now writing sentences and reading sentences that she didn't have any recollection of at the beginning of the year so the main thing i really liked about this curriculum was it was all together this is in my opinion and i might be biased because this is only the second curriculum that i have ever been exposed to but in my opinion i liked how for beginning homeschooler this was all kind of laid out for me i didn't have to pick a bunch of different subjects and try to push them together and i didn't have to go and try to make sure i was checking off the boxes this was a comprehensive collection i know they are meeting state standards i know i can be confident that they're getting what kids in classroom settings will be getting with a biblical worldview i really really like that science and heritage studies and literature and english and reading was all just seamlessly put together everything worked together and built upon each other spelling was in there a little bit handwriting worked it all worked so well so i wasn't having to pull different curriculums together and hope that i covered all the basics it's all right there so i think for if you are just now getting into homeschooling and you're like what do i do i'm so overwhelmed i want to make sure my child learns what they're supposed to learn this is a great curriculum and the price is not awful i have seen way more expensive curriculums out there i have family who are educators and my sister specifically is an early education teacher she taught kindergarten for eight years and she taught a bunch of other early ed grades i think right now she's in second grade and she was telling me that my daughter can do some things that some of her second graders can't do when they start and she's my daughter's just five so i don't know if my sister's just being super nice to my kid but i'm thoroughly impressed by this curriculum the only thing i would do differently just structure wise for my kid is i would put i would flip-flop how they introduce the um heritage studies and science i would put it at the end i'd have him learn all the basics first and then do the fun stuff at the end but it's not a critique against how they structured it just a preference my daughter has so what we generally use when we switch the distance learning was i have one of these little craft desks i mean because they're technically two stacked here but this is what we used for my daughter she puts her workbook right here she's got her pencil here and then her supplies that she needs is right there so this has worked for her when she's sitting in our living room she has grown though so this is where the book if i had a spiral bound book this would be better because i could fold it back instead of she does have trouble flip-flopping it over it's kind of she's growing out of it so supplies that you will absolutely need for this is pencil we purchased these my first something something pencils they're a little bit thicker around than your normal number two skinny skinnier pencil and i got a little grippy to help her know where to keep her fingers one of the things we still struggle with is she tries to hold the tip back here they do work really hard on pencil grip and how to properly hold a pencil in this curriculum so i know it's something she's gonna learn i would also purchase i recommend as many erasers as you possibly can because this is a new pencil and she's already worn down the eraser i got this little fun eraser-shaped puzzle things from the 99-cent store so we've got lots of erasers you'll need popsicle sticks you can get these at the 99-cent store or the dollar tree you'll need some safety scissors we got these from the dollar tree the most important thing in my opinion that you're gonna need is all the glue sticks in the world i thought i had so many glue sticks in this house and i'm scrounging around these last couple weeks trying to find glue sticks in my house i'm trying to hold out till the fall when all these back to school sales happen but when you're preparing for the school year don't buy just one or just one pack i would buy multiple packs of glue sticks because you go through at least a glue stick a unit so you're gonna need at least six glue sticks you're gonna need those there are a few projects where you're gonna need elmer's school glue you don't need this very often but these are they use this a lot for the arts and craft type stuff so you'll need that for that you'll need paper plates i was using the dixie cut plates because that's what i had and then i got tired of wasting nice paper plates so a pack of little cheapy paper plates work just great dollar tree dollar general walmart available pretty much anywhere but they do stuff like that you can see that we used paint so a basic set of acrylic paint or washable paint crayola paint they do use paint here and there i used actually i i also bought like a tablecloth from dollar tree we use our drop cloth and you'll need construction papers you won't use a lot of construction paper so just purchasing a packet of construction paper will be good you'll need a little bit of pipe cleaners i think dollar tree has pipe cleaners if not i know dollar general has pipe cleaners you don't need a ton of pipe cleaners you'll need them for a couple projects and then you'll also need yarn for a few of the projects so yarn's a good thing to have as well and then last but not least one more thing i would recommend for if you're going to be going on the go or extra practice is doing one of these i can't remember where i got this was probably walmart but it's just the pre-lined papers i was showing her how to write e and she would practice and then with the lowercase e we would practice and then we would do lessons and i would tell me to display a sentence and she was practicing punctuation this came in handy well as i sit in my mess now that i've made trying to go through all of this i really hope that i did you guys justice going through what i think are all the things you need to know but i really hope that all of this information helps you form an opinion and idea of whether or not this curriculum is for you i will leave you with this question what curriculum have you a used for kinder or what are you gonna use what are you thinking of if it's something separate then then bju presses focus on fives there's a ton of different curriculums out there and every family is different their situation is different in the learning styles and learning needs of each family are different too i love to see different curriculums out there if you have any questions that i may have skimmed over i have notes like crazy in front of me i hope i covered everything clearly to your understanding but if you have any questions go ahead and drop a question down in the comments i do check them i do answer them i appreciate feedback i do request that people remain kind to one another this is an educational platform we're all learning and this is something to inform people my opinion of how i experience this curriculum with my child i hope you all have a blessed day and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Bre Ambros

Views: 942

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Focus on Fives, BJU Press Kindergarten, Kindergarten homeschool, Kindergarten Curriculem, Distance Learning, Parent taught, DLO vs Parent taught, DLO, K5 Material, Kindergarten Material, kindergarten science, kindergarten heritage studies, kindergarten literature, Kindergarten homeschool curriculum, homeschool curriculum, 2020-2021 school year, 2020-2021 kindergarten, Homeschool supplies, homeschool, DOL, Bob Jones University Press, BJU Press, focus on fives review

Id: hscwv7Ex8Gc

Length: 68min 31sec (4111 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021