I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me earlier. To be honest, and to my shame, it wasn’t even my idea–it was Ryan who came up with it.

When we started kindergarten last year, we began with Sonlight’s P 4/5 Core, but added Core K’s Language Arts and Readers.  The 4/5 stuff was just too easy–learning letters and their sounds and such, which Turkey and Bunny already knew.  Core K LA was a good fit, because it reviews letter sounds, and starts with reading simple, three letter words. And that was great for us when we started, because, even though they knew all the letter sounds, it took them some time to figure out how to turn that into words.

But for a few months now, Turkey and Bunny have been reading three letter words with ease, and have been venturing out into five and six letter words when they can.  So, in planning my curriculum for next year, I realized that the Core 1 LA and Readers may not provide enough of a challenge for them to last the whole year, but, they’re not something I can really skip, either.

So, Ryan had a great plan.  I’m going to order the LA and Readers from Core 1 next week, and in the meantime, I’m going to finish the Core K stuff by doing two letters a week instead of one.  This way, we’ll start the Core 1 stuff before we’re done with our kindergarten year, and if we accelerate the pace of that, too, we’ll finish them early into 1st grade, and be able to start on (and hopefully finish) the Core 2 LA and Readers by the end of 1st grade.

It seems like such an easy plan, now–if only I had thought of it before, we’d be well into the Core 1 readers by now!