Homeschool Kindergarten: A Full Year Plan You Can Actually Finish
A week-by-week kindergarten plan covering phonics, maths, science and fine motor skills in about two hours a day — with the parts you are allowed to skip marked clearly.
Amara Reid
Head of Curriculum ·
Kindergarten is the year most homeschooling parents over-schedule. The child is four or five, delighted by everything, and it feels like you could teach them anything — so the plan balloons to seven subjects and collapses in November.
Here is a full 36-week plan built the other way round: the minimum that reliably produces a reading, counting, confident child, plus clearly labelled extras.
The non-negotiable core: 90 minutes a day
Three things matter this year. Everything else is enrichment.
1. Phonics and reading — 30 minutes, five days a week. By the end of the year your child should be able to decode words with common digraphs and read a short decodable book aloud. This is the single highest-value thing you will do all year.
2. Maths — 30 minutes, five days a week. Counting to 100, number bonds to 10 known by heart, addition and subtraction within 20. If bonds to ten are automatic by June, Grade 1 will be straightforward.
3. Fine motor and handwriting — 15 to 20 minutes, four days a week. Pencil grip, letter formation, cutting, threading, playdough. Weak fine motor control is the most common reason bright five-year-olds hate writing.
That is roughly eighty minutes. Add ten minutes of reading aloud to your child — which is not optional, but also should not feel like school.
The 36-week shape
Term 1, weeks 1–12: Foundations
- Phonics: revise all single letter sounds at speed; CVC blending and segmenting; tricky words set 1.
- Maths: counting to 20; the ten-frame; teen numbers as ten-and-some-more; ordering and comparing.
- Fine motor: big shapes, pre-writing patterns, letter families.
- Science (optional, 1 session/week): living and non-living; growing cress.
Week 12 checkpoint: can your child blend a three-sound word they have never seen before, and count 17 objects accurately without recounting?
Term 2, weeks 13–24: Consolidation
- Phonics: consonant digraphs (sh, ch, th, ng); first vowel digraphs (ai, ee, oa); tricky words set 2; first decodable books.
- Maths: every number bond to 10; addition and subtraction within 20 by bridging through ten; introduction to tens and ones.
- Fine motor: consistent letter height, finger spaces, writing a full sentence.
- Science (optional): seasons, weather chart, materials.
Week 24 checkpoint: can they read a six-page decodable book aloud without you supplying words, and answer "what makes ten with seven?" in under three seconds?
Term 3, weeks 25–36: Fluency
- Phonics: alternative spellings (ay, ea, igh, oo); reading in phrases; comprehension questions.
- Maths: numbers to 100; counting in 2s, 5s and 10s; simple word problems; 2D and 3D shape; measuring.
- Writing: two-sentence stories, writing about a picture.
- Science (optional): habitats, floating and sinking, people who help us.
Week 36 checkpoint: read a short book with expression; write two sentences with capital letters and full stops; count confidently to 100.
A realistic daily rhythm
| Slot | Length | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Morning 1 | 30 min | Phonics lesson, then read the decodable book |
| Movement break | 15 min | Outside, genuinely outside |
| Morning 2 | 30 min | Maths: four minutes fluency, then the lesson |
| Table time | 20 min | Handwriting or fine motor activity |
| Read-aloud | 15 min | You read, they listen — picture books and early chapter books |
Total: under two hours. Finish before lunch, every day. The afternoon is for play, and play at this age is not a reward for finishing school — it is the other half of the curriculum.
What you are allowed to skip
- Formal science. Genuinely optional at KG. Answering "why" questions as they come up is enough.
- History and geography. Skip entirely. Stories and maps on the wall do the job.
- Worksheets for their own sake. If a worksheet is not assessing or practising something specific, it is colouring with extra steps.
- Any topic your child is clearly not ready for. Readiness at this age moves in weeks. Come back to it.
The three things that go wrong
Pushing writing too early. If letter formation is a battle, the problem is usually hand strength, not attitude. Do two weeks of playdough, scissors and threading before returning to the pencil.
*Teaching letter names instead of letter sounds.* A child who knows "double-you" but not /w/ cannot blend. Sounds first; names can wait.
Moving on because the plan says so. Number bonds to ten take some children six weeks and others twenty. The plan is a sequence, not a schedule.
If you only achieve two things this year — fluent blending and instant number bonds to ten — your child will start Grade 1 ahead of most of their peers. Everything else is a bonus.
Our KG track follows this exact sequence, with 96 phonics lessons, 30 decodable books and 88 maths lessons already mapped to the 36 weeks above.
Tagged
- kindergarten
- KG
- year plan
- phonics
- early years
Put this into practice tomorrow
A free Fayferz account gives you the complete FYP phonics course and the first two lessons of everything else, worksheets included. No card details required.