The beauty of homeschooling is that you can give him access to skills and content at every one of his levels. It is, of course, less intimidating to use a packaged curriculum during your first year of homeschooling, but you may want to be prepared to have a child working across a multi-grade span, which is pretty incompatible with most complete curricula. Up until we reach courses for which I might want to document high school credit, I've used a fairly stripped-down approach to homeschooling:
At the child's instructional levels, we do
1. math (may be scribed or done orally, as needed, to accommodate asynchrony between math and fine-motor skills),
2. handwriting (until manuscript fluency is achieved),
3. spelling (if needed), and
4. reading (until fluency is achieved).
History and science are treated as extensions of story time or free reading, and can be interest-led. For my upper elementary and middle-schoolers, we've integrated language arts (reading comprehension and written expression) into history and science.
Art, music, and movement are through fun experiences and child-led interests.
In your case, you have the added advantage that this is only kindergarten, which is likely not mandatory in your state or province, so you really don't have to complete any particular benchmarks for any particular subjects. Use or don't use any components of the curriculum that appeal to you and him. If you feel his fine motor skills need work, then let him enjoy fine motor activities. For the remaining academic skills, I agree that you can just keep following him. You may have to investigate some higher-level math curricula, though. (We used Singapore Math. Check around the Recommended Resources forum for other math suggestions.)
In most districts, he would be a very young kindergartner for this coming school year. Feel free to keep the "school day" very short (e.g., under an hour total), and broken up into tiny chunks. In fact, if his reading is developing on its own, spending five to ten minutes each on handwriting and math per day is probably perfectly adequate for structured learning. Unless, of course, he asks for more!
As to his behavior: if much of it really is driven by boredom, then it may be that he will find better channels for his energy once he has some intellectual challenge. You may find that, for example, once you start doing math with him, he blows through quite a lot of curriculum in a few months (especially at the beginning, when it is not clear what his actual level is, and you are only slowing for brief moments to fill in little gaps where he had no exposure to the skills). Once you reach his true instructional level, it may be that his desire for new learning will finally be met with something of substance.
Also, since he is reading, as his skills develop, he may find that some of his intellectual sensation-seeking and curiosity can be addressed through reading a wider range of content.
Last edited by aeh; 04/23/16 12:03 PM.
