What's Covered in Age 4-5
The Beyond the Page Age 4-5 level offers a comprehensive, hands-on curriculum designed to engage young learners through literature-based activities and creative exploration. This program takes students on an interactive journey through carefully selected stories, where they follow characters on adventures such as picking blueberries, catching fireflies, and exploring nature on leaf hunts. Each unit integrates hands-on art projects, interactive dramatizations, and musical activities that bring the stories to life and deepen comprehension.
Primarily used as a kindergarten-level homeschool curriculum, the Age 4-5 program can also serve as an advanced preschool option for children ready to dive into structured learning. With a focus on fostering curiosity and building foundational skills, this curriculum provides an engaging start for young homeschoolers, blending story-based learning with critical thinking, creativity, and social-emotional growth.
Designed to captivate and educate, this curriculum gives young children a solid introduction to learning while nurturing a love for reading and discovery—ideal for families seeking a flexible, literature-based homeschool experience for early learners.
Learning Should Be Fun
Each week, students dive into a new story, where lessons are built around the book's characters and themes to make learning immersive and engaging. In A Is for Musk Ox, children act out musk ox behaviors, gaining insight into the animal's traits, while in Hondo and Fabian, they mimic movements like “zigzag” to connect physical actions with descriptive words. The Little Island inspires children to create maps of story events, developing sequence skills and spatial awareness. With What Do You Do With a Tail Like This?, students design custom tails using craft materials, learning about animal adaptations through imaginative play.
These are just a few examples you will experience in the first weeks of our Age 4-5 literature-based curriculum. Along the way students will learn letters and sounds, vocabulary, and sight words, and practice handwriting. Each unit contains integrated math activities to reinforce basic math skills in counting, adding and subtracting, comparing, and sorting. The literature selections inspire engaging science and social studies activities, including making maps, modeling land forms, researching animals, and conducting fun science experiments. You and your child will love this integrated approach to all of the subjects.
Lesson Structure
The full-year homeschool curriculum is organized into 26 week-long units, each focusing on a specific letter. Additionally, four holiday-themed units are included, offering festive activities to celebrate major holidays.
Each unit includes the following elements:
- a literature selection,
- math activities,
- science and social studies activities,
- letter recognition activities,
- handwriting activities,
- reading workshop,
- writing workshop,
- vocabulary words,
- sight words, and
- art, music, and drama activities.
Comprehensive Materials Kit
One of the highlights for you as the teacher is that this level comes with the most comprehensive materials kit available, so there will be very little shopping that you will have to do to provide this rich, hands-on learning environment for your child. You will receive a box that includes fun art materials, stickers, die-cuts, and other supplies that will make implementing this curriculum easy and fun!
Homeschool Preschool or Kindergarten
The Beyond the Page Age 4-5 program can be used for preschool or kindergarten curriculum. For students that are ready to start reading instruction, this level can be comined with our Age 5-7 Reading Program. When used in conjunction with our reading program, the Age 4-5 program completely covers the Common Core standards for kindergarten math and language arts.
Your child will love learning science, social studies, language arts, and math with this integrated, hands-on approach.
Student Skill Prerequisites
- Interested in being read to
- Able to converse about what is being read
- Able to hold a pencil
- Has a beginning interest in sounds and letters
What Else Do I Need?
The Beyond the Page Age 4-5 program will introduce your child to reading and writing letters and words, but it is not a complete reading program. If you are using this level as a preschool program for your child, you should not need to supplement. If this is your child's kindergarten year, however, you may want to consider using the 5-7 Full Year Reading Package in conjunction with the Age 4-5 program.
Most families that use Beyond the Page don't choose to supplement with a separate math program for children in preschool or kindergarten. The Age 4-5 level will cover all of the standards for Kindergarten math, but we don't provide the daily structured review that some students are ready for. If you think that your child is more advanced in math and is ready to move forward you can consider starting with the Age 5-7 Math Program.
Unit List
- Week 1: A - A Is for Musk Ox
- Week 2: H - Hondo and Fabian
- Week 3: I - The Little Island
- Week 4: T - What Do You Do With a Tail Like This?
- Week 5: L - We're Going on a Leaf Hunt
- Week 6: F - Fireflies
- Week 7: E - But No Elephants
- Week 8: C - Millions of Cats
- Week 9: G - The Real Mother Goose
- Week 10: O - Owl Babies
- Week 11: S - Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree
- Week 12: D - Dinosaurs Big and Small
- Week 13: P - Harold and the Purple Crayon
- Week 14: B - Blueberries for Sal
- Week 15: R - Rain
- Week 16: N - Night in the Country
- Week 17: M - Marshmallow
- Week 18: U - Umbrella
- Week 19: J - Jump Frog Jump
- Week 20: K - Kindness
- Week 21: V - Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin
- Week 22: Y - Little Blue and Little Yellow
- Week 23: W - George Washington's Birthday
- Week 24: Q - The Quilt Story
- Week 25: X - An Extraordinary Egg
- Week 26: Z - Greedy Zebra
- Week 27: Halloween
- Week 28: Thanksgiving
- Week 29: Christmas
- Week 30: February Celebrations