Sun Unit – My Father’s World Kindergarten

For our second week of kindergarten, we studied the sun using our curriculum, My Father’s World Creation from A to Z (MFW K). The first unit of MFW K is a two-week unit about creation and it’s designed to be a gentle introduction to the school year, so this week was really our first week diving into the actual structure of our kindergarten curriculum. In this post, I’m sharing what went well, what didn’t, and a little about how I got overwhelmed by allll the things.

In this series, I review each week of our kindergarten year and the units we do together. My hope is that this post and the others in this series will be helpful for families using MFW, but also for other homeschool families doing similar unit studies in the kindergarten and early elementary years.

For some helpful context, my son is currently 4.5 years old.

Related: Our Kindergarten Homeschool Plans

The First Real Week of MFW K

Like I mentioned above, the first two weeks of MFW K are set up to be a very gentle start to the school year, so the sun unit in week 3 is really the first week that follows the curriculum’s typical rhythm. And, boy, does it pick up. I was a little nervous about the slow pace of the first couple weeks (we ended up combining the two weeks into one because they were so light – you can read about that here.)

Because I work full-time, though, my time for homeschooling is pretty strictly limited to one hour per day, and, after this week, I’m wondering how we’re going to get it all done. I think, as we get more used to the rhythm, things will speed up a little and we’ll be able to get to more each day.

We also keep a four-day school week because my husband has Friday off and it’s a dedicated, kid-free work day for me. At the beginning of the week, I made a plan for doing the Friday activities on other days, but this will likely need some trial and error to figure out when those activities fit in best.

Because I was initially worried about the curriculum possibly not feeling like enough, I actually purchased Little School of Smith’s “Me and My Place in Space” curriculum. The plan was to use some of the activities and book suggestions to add to the sun unit this week and the moon unit next week. While we did use some of it, we ran out of time for most of it.

What Went Well

Like I mentioned above, my work schedule really limits the amount of time I can commit to homeschooling each day – typically about one hour. Within that time, there was a lot that we didn’t get to this week, but here’s what we did get to:

The calendar and 100 chart each day. Introducing the letter s and flashcard, singing the a-a-apple song. Doing the picture cards page and math page. Reading the poem once. Reading “Moonbear’s Shadow” once. Reading “God’s Amazing World”. One day of the Bible discussion. Making raisins.

Overall, my son really enjoyed all of what we did. He was fascinated with the calendar and 100 chart, so it will be enjoyable to continue working through those with him. He also really enjoyed the couple of times that we used a dark room and flashlight to demonstrate the sun and shadows and how they work.

I wish we’d had more time to get to more of the activities, because my son would have really enjoyed more.

What We Disliked or Skipped

Like I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot we “skipped” but mostly because we just didn’t have time for them. However, even if we had the time, I think there’s likely a couple things we still would have skipped.

For example, the worksheets felt like too much for my son. Doing two or three of them was fine, but I could tell my son was getting some worksheet fatigue and wasn’t excited about doing more of them. I think it’s likely that I’ll choose from the worksheets each week and not have him do all of them most weeks.

What We Added

The addition of Little School of Smith’s “Me and My Place in Space” would have been really great if we’d had enough time. There are some really fun activities in there that I would have loved to do and that would have fit nicely with what we were learning. However, the only thing we really ended up doing was watching two of the suggested videos and getting some of the books from the library.

Videos

Here are the two videos we added. Both were very quick (about two-minute), well-made videos that can be found on YouTube.

“Our Sun” by Kids Academy – This video was just okay to me. It was high quality, but it focused quite a bit on the formation and longevity of the sun and used an old earth timeline. I just didn’t feel like it was all that helpful for my son at this age.

“How the Sun Affects the Earth” by Kids Academy – This video, on the other hand, was phenomenal. It fit in really well with what we were learning about the sun and shadows and how days and seasons work. I highly recommend it.

Indescribable

The only other addition we made this week was to read a couple of the devotions from “Indescribable” by Loui Giglio. I picked up this book from our church’s book sale last weekend. It’s been on my books-to-buy list for a while, and I love how well the devotions fit in with a lot of what we’re learning this year.

The book focuses on God’s creation and is informative, fun, and shows how all of creation points back to its Creator. I’m looking forward to including this book in our learning by picking out a couple devotions each week that relate to our unit for the week. Although, I think we’ll likely make this a bedtime or dinnertime read for the whole family moving forward instead of adding it into our school time, like we did this week.

Our Favorite Sun Books

We got a massive stack of books about the sun from the library this week. We always read two books and a Bible story before bed each night, and we read these books during that time. Here are our favorites:

“The Night World” by Mordicai Gerstein – This book really captured my son’s attention and imagination. The idea of night and what happens at night is really fascinating for him, so this book sparked a lot of great conversation. It has the added bonus of truly stunning illustrations.

“Sun Up, Sun Down” by Gail Gibbons – At first glance, I wasn’t sure about this book. The illustrations seemed dated and didn’t capture my attention. After reading it, though, this really should be required reading for the unit. It’s a great overview of what we were learning about the sun and how it affects the earth.

“A Child’s Good Morning Book” by Margaret Wise Brown – This book was highly amusing to me, mostly because the illustrations did not fit the language. The language in this book is stunning, and, read without the illustrations, is a beautiful poem about daybreak. The illustrations are cute and well-done; they just don’t match the sophistication of the language.

One Last Note

This week going through the sun unit was really fun and also a bit of a reality check. I’m still really looking forward to our year together and all that we’re going to learn, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that our time for homeschooling each day is limited and we’ll need to work within those limitations.

We’ll see how the moon unit goes next week and I’ll keep you updated. I think it will be interesting to see if we fall into a rhythm that helps us to get a little more done each day over time.