The Wonderful World curriculum is designed to be what children need to do to learn – play! This year long program gives you the tools to create a magical, playful year of learning for your child. Each lesson gives you a list of picture books around a theme of the week, read as many as your child wants. Each lesson also has a nursery rhyme or song to sing, to work on vocabulary skills and play with language. Then, there are some ways to play with the ideas of week. These activities include games, imagination, problem solving and learning about the world around us!
The weekly themes include seasons, animals, trains, cars, countries of the world, and outer space. Wonderful World has activities and books that cover a wide range of things kids find interesting and want to learn about! This method means that school can be easy and fun, for all of you! Designed to be a perfect year of kindergarten, the activities also work for a range of ages, so siblings can all play and learn together. And because it is developmentally appropriate, you and your child won’t be frustrated by activities that are too hard to do for a child this age.
The FSLL programs are all written by a homeschooling mom who is also an occupational therapist. She saw that there was a need for a secular, developmentally appropriate option for parents who want kindergarten to be easy and fun. She also wrote it to work for older students who have learning challenges and need something different to develop their language, fine motor skills, thinking and reasoning skills. Lessons are engaging for the whole child and include working on developing fine motor skills before you start writing.
Other programs throw kids this age into reading and writing too fast, before they are ready, This leads to frustration, and some kids think they hate learning. Instead, this program will give you the tools to build motor skills and coordination that will prepare your chid for reading and writing later. They will work on telling stories and drawing pictures, things that should come before they write their great novel. Don’t worry, there is plenty of time for that later. And with a playful year of fun, they will build the imagination needed to create novels!
This is a full-color, downloadable PDF document with links to videos and external resources, book and supply lists, worksheets, and corresponding activities for a full school year’s worth of learning.
$34.95
Wonderful World covers a wide range of topics, including:
Memory work — There are 28 separate memory work verses, one for every lesson. You can use these to work on public speaking, as vocabulary lessons, as copy work.
Language Arts — You’ll explore language with your child through different forms of expression including:
- songs
- writing
- recitation
- poetry
- rhythm
- rhyme
- haiku
- and storytelling
Math — The math is designed around real-world problems and concrete concepts that are relatable to your child based on the book you’ve read. A wide range of topics are introduced and revisited over the course of the year including
- graphing
- telling time
- calendars
- measuring weight and length
- comparing measurements
- estimation
- counting to 100
- adding to 10
- and word problems
Science — Covering a wide range of topics in Biology, Zoology, Astronomy, and Meteorology. Including:
- alligators and reptiles
- fish and ocean life
- plant life cycles
- food chains
- life cycles
- hibernation
- habitats
- migration
- marsupials
- mammals
- birds
- weather
- wind
- Earth’s orbit
- the solar system.
Social Studies — Children are introduced to ideas about how their community works and to the bigger world around them. Topics Include public transit, public works (roads), city organization, civic responsibilities, family structures, and areas around the world including:
- Australia
- Japan
- Italy
- Peru
- South Africa
- China
- The Arctic
- and Antartica
Simple Lessons that Lead to Life-Long Learning
We at Five Senses Literature Lessons know that children are innately curious about the world around them and do not think about what they are learning in terms of subject area. Children don’t see the world in terms of math or reading or science. A simple game can touch on topics in each of those subject areas and more. In addition to the traditional school subjects of reading, writing, math, science and social studies, there are important things to learn about the world through art, music, food, dance, and play. Wonderful World – Level: Orange seeks to help you introduce to your child a wide range of experiences through many different avenues.
Each lesson includes a memory verse. Many include a song to sing each day and some songs include dances. There are activities for cooking with your child, simple art projects, physical games, and field trips. Each activity is based on the related book and theme for the week and has layered benefits. Art projects and cooking activities exercise your child’s fine motor control, getting those little hands ready for writing as they get older. Physical games, dances, apple picking, and other activities help work your child’s gross motor control and development. Music and art help demonstrate to your child different forms of expression. Cooking and jumping up and down and taking a walk for leaves are all activities that provide many options for new sensory input for your child. Wonderful World – Level: Orange helps you lay a foundation for your child for full-engagement living and learning. Everything in your child’s world is something that they can experience and learn from and this program helps give you the tools to show them how.
Learning Through Literature
Each lesson starts with a wonderful picture book. By looking at the pictures in the story, your child is able to imagine themselves there in the story with our characters. The act of not only hearing the story but also seeing it, engages both the sense of hearing and vision, bringing the story to life.
The stories included in the Wonderful World – Level: Orange curriculum include a variety of classics, modern stories, Newberry Award winners and Reading Rainbow books. The books are available on Amazon and at most local libraries. We have gone to great effort to ensure the books are currently in print and readily accessible for most families. We’ve even found that many of the books are available on YouTube being read aloud.
To see the full list of books included in the lessons, click here.
Written by an Occupational Therapist for All Children
Children learn best when all of their senses are engaged, and the topics are presented in a way that respects childhood development. Too many curricula for children skip over the importance of play and exploration, moving straight into reading, writing, and math. Subjects are often taught in a way that isolates them from other ideas making them feel more foreign and complicated than they need to be.
As an occupational therapist, I have a unique perspective on childhood development. Children use games and play to explore their world naturally. By using play and fun activities, you can tap into their natural curiosity and feed their minds while helping them develop the physical skills needed for success in academics and life.
Five Senses Literature Lessons is designed to be used with any child, regardless of where the child stands concerning academic readiness. Such flexibility is possible because the curriculum is developmentally appropriate and respects the child. It is adaptable and expandable to suit your child’s interest and pursue growth in your child’s abilities in a gentle and fun way.
Easy to Use Starting Day One
We’ve designed our curriculum to be easy to use and with limited start-up or prep time required. The supplies needed are simple and often things you’ll have around the house. We’ve created a simple list of supplies needed for the entire lesson at the start of each lesson so you can review it before starting any activities. We’ve embedded hyperlinks to all external resources, YouTube videos, and appendix pages to make it easy to navigate from any computer or tablet. And all the subjects are color-coded and clearly indicated so you can find the right activity for a given day easily.
In addition to the bonus information and links to external resources in the curriculum, we’ve provided additional resources here on our website and our Pinterest page to give you more ideas of activities to do with your child if they want to dive deeper into a particular unit. We are constantly updating the content on our Pinterest and Blog with new ideas, helpful hints, and inspiration.
We believe home education should be fun and engaging for both you and your child. It is our goal to provide you with support and inspiration along with a simple, developmentally appropriate framework for educating your child.