Christian Liberty Press (CLP) has published more and more of their own resources over the many years they have supported homeschooling. They now have a kindergarten program that exclusively uses their own CLP resources. CLP also offers their CLASS Home Education program that provides more direction and oversight, but you can purchase the program to use on your own.
The Kindergarten Curriculum Kit includes the CLASS Lesson Planner, a guide for developing lesson plans as well as the record-keeping pages you need to do so. CLP’s kindergarten program is very academic with texts and workbooks, although most of the books caution parents to consider completing exercises orally rather than requiring written work if students are overwhelmed by the amount of writing.
Parents will need to plan how many pages to complete each day in each book. Some of the books coordinate with each other, and it’s important to plan accordingly. Most important in that regard are the math and phonics books. Liberty Mathematics K and Adventures in Phonics A, parallel each other much of the time. Hearts and Hands correlates closely with both of these books as a reinforcement for both math and phonics lesson. Hearts and Hands is not absolutely essential and might be considered optional if your child is having trouble completing all of the written work. However, if a child isn’t mastering the concepts in Liberty Mathematics K and Adventures in Phonics A, it would be better to slow the entire program down and use Hearts and Hands to provide additional practice and review or practice and review with resources that might better address the child’s learning style. (Remember that in the not too distant past, children were not expected to learn to read or to do addition and subtraction until first grade!)
The phonics program also uses CLP’s Kindergarten Phonics Readers, the Christian Liberty Nature Reader Book K, and a Phonics Sounds CD. The In the Beginning handwriting workbook teaches manuscript printing.
Social Studies is taught with Little Pilgrim’s in God’s World text and activity book. This course includes significant coverage of Bible/religion. Bible Treasures: Genesis to Ruth presents illustrated Bible stories with questions, catechism work, and arts-and-crafts activities. The World God Made is an introduction to science from a Christian worldview. Celebrating Art teaches basic art and also provides arts-and-crafts activities.
The kit also includes a book for parents, Training Children in Godliness. While this is not a part of the curriculum, it certainly is helpful for child training, something we need to continually address if we hope to be successful in our homeschooling.
CLP sells the kit at a discounted price over purchasing individual items. However, if you do not need all of the items, you might be better off buying them selectively. All of these resources are useful on their own or alongside resources from other publishers. Hearts and Hands is the only one that is really closely aligned to other program components.
