Kindergarten at Home: For Parents, Teachers, and Homeschoolers

This book gives a lot of practical ideas for activities for homeschooling a kindergartener. The book is set up so that you could do one activity each day of the "school year", but I doubt most readers would use it that way. The diverse activities range from field trips, to making posters, to playing games, among other things. The list of supplies needed for the projects, which is found in the front of the book, are things most households with young children probably already have anyway.

Some of the ideas given are truly novel and I would not have thought of them on my own. Others are more familiar, but it is helpful to be reminded of them when you need an idea for a project.

One reason I couldn't rate this book five stars is that it's a little amateur-looking. There are a few obvious typos that should have been caught by a proofreader. It is, however, a useful book with many good ideas in a well-organized format.

Kindergarten at Home, by Cheryl Gorder, is a very practical and concise source of creative craft and educational ideas for three to five-year olds. It is a very user-friendly book because of its layout, which includes a Table of Contents and an Index of Activities, presented on the fourth page, right after a brief biography of the author. On the fifth page, the reader is already introduced with relief to a short, yet practical list of the Materials Needed to Teach This Program, which quickly demonstrates one can indeed do creative and educative activities at home without buying fancy or expensive materials. In fact, all of the ones listed and used in this book should be readily available in most homes. The subsequent pages of the book's beginning include an Introduction to the Parent/Teacher with encouraging words from the author for anybody who is considering introducing this type of program at home; a section on Why Kindergarten at Home, with five brief yet common-sense reasons; another section on How to Tell if Your Child is Ready for Kindergarten, like the informational sheets given by other similar school programs; a section entitled General Principals (sic) for Teaching Kindergarten, with logical advice; and, a section on Reading to Your Child, with ideas any librarian would eagerly support. After this brief, general section, the author goes straight to work listing one activity for each of the following 257 pages. Each activity is presented in an easy-to-read format with the title in boldfaced capital letters and with a hightlighted section listing the purpose of the exercise and the materials needed. This is followed by a one-sentence message to the Parent/Teacher telling the benefits of the particular activity. The author then presents the directions for the exercise in numerical order, a feature which facilitates following them. In addition, each page is illustrated with a clip-art drawing, which may be useful especially for those activities for which the child might be looking directly at the page, such as songs and rhymes. Although many of the activities presented in this book are ideas which one might find in other books, or which one might think of independently, the attractiveness of Kindergarten at Home is that the ideas have been clearly spelled out and explained by the author so as to facilitate their use by the reader and their application for homeschooling record-keeping by the parents. This book would definitely complement any after-school or homeschooling library for Kindergartners.