Tell me about your K experiences!

[MittensKittens]

Those of you who are doing Kindergarten at home, and are new homeschoolers, how are you doing? Are you happy with your experience thus far, and how are your kids doing? What curriculum are you using, if applicable? How much time do you spend on "school stuff" each day? What do you do?

DD will be five soon, and we have been using a play-based curriculum for a year now (for K). She is always asking for "school work", though I try to take a whole-life approach to learning and don't focus on the curriculum much. It can be fun, and it is a nice tool, but we haven't used it to the letter and don't follow their daily lesson plans to the letter. Part of the challenge is that all the great curricula I read about are in English, and the kids' primary language is not English at this stage - they are trilingual with English being the least preferred language, because we live in Europe. There are no good curricula in the preferred language, but we do read tons of books in that language. 

DD taught herself to read and write last year, and is doing basic math. None of the things she mastered were a direct result of the curriculum. I've now arrived at an "Am I doing enough?" freak-out moment, which many homeschoolers seem to have. I am also thinking what to do next year. I think I would benefit from more structure, and DD might too. Because homeschooling is illegal where we live, I also keep very detailed records of all DD's work and feel I have to be able to show to authorities that DD is advanced (which she is) and is doing better at home than she would be in public school.

I'd love to hear some experiences. I Know K is "early days" and at this point, DD is learning a lot from almost anything, but five seems like the age at which I should be doing "more".

[Greenmama2]

Hi there. There's a K chat thread you might like to join in on. I understand the freak-out thing. The school year starts in Jan/Feb here so we are just coming up to the point when all DD's peers who started K are taking their first break & their parents are reflecting on how much they've changed and how much they've learned since starting school. It's hard not to worry. I had a mini-freak out last week when I couldn't stop myself from comparing DD's very basic reading to a schooled friend's much more fluent reading. But then I signed her up for an online maths programme (because I knew she'd enjoy it, not because of the freak-out) and she finished the kindergarten level in one day. Oh yeah, that's right, they all have different strengths. *slaps head* lol
As for curriculum, we unschool and DD has available for whenever she feels like it:
* Singapore Math
*Miquon Math
*Mathletics
(I did mention she enjoys maths right?)
*Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding
*Song School Latin
*Explode the Code
DD also likes to borrow a couple of Fitzroy readers from the library each week. She calls them her sentence books and gets annoyed if she can't find any she hasn't read yet. They are the only thing she will attempt to read independently at this stage (well, out loud anyway). Which is fine.