Our Review of Kindergarten with Ace and Christi: Using A.C.E.'s Reading Readiness Program With My 4 Year Old

Little Brother (our 4 year old middle child) is doing K4 this year.

We started K4 back in the early spring using The Gentle + Classical Preschool Level 1. This was a terrific program designed for 2-4 year olds, and we really had a lot of fun using it through the summer.

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Then in August, we were given the opportunity to borrow the entire set of 4 Teacher's Manuals, phonics audio CD, and phonics flashcards for A.C.E's Reading Readiness Program, Kindergarten with Ace and Christi, from a friend to use with Little Brother this year. It was a deal I simply could not pass up, and then the Lord provided the finances for us to get Little Brother the set of PACEs (workbooks) to complete the program!

Although I had never used this particular program before (I used ABeka's K4 with Big Brother), I had heard and read great things about it and was very eager to give it a try.

My husband learned to read using A.C.E. curriculum. It was so funny, he came home from work the evening I had gotten the flashcards, and his eyes lit up with recognition when he looked into the box: "Hey, where'd you get Abby Antelope?!" He STILL remembers the names of all the little animals that the program uses to help teach the letter sounds.

And now, here we are 6 weeks into the Kindergarten with Ace and Christi program, and I wanted to share our review.

Kindergarten with Ace and Christi is a full-year program from A.C.E. designed to help 3-5 year olds get ready for learning to read. 

This program is what we might call "old-school" Kindergarten as it does not expect students to begin reading or to begin writing letters or numbers just yet. So although the program is called "Kindergarten," it is more like a modern Pre-K program. I find it to be at the perfect level for Little Brother.

As I stated, the program requires the use of a set of 4 huge Teacher Manuals. These manuals contain all the daily stories and lessons, detailed instructions for completing all the students' PACE work, scheduling suggestions, P.E. activities, songs, Bible memory work, craft ideas, reproducible games and bulletin boards, and much more. The daily lesson plans are so well-organized and very detailed so that almost anyone could read through a lesson and be able to teach it right away.

The curriculum was originally written for use in a church-school setting, but it works great as a homeschool program!

Little Brother has 5 PACE (workbook) subjects, and each subject has 12 PACEs to complete for the year just like in all the other levels of the A.C.E curriculum. The subjects include Word Building, Math, English, Science, and Social Studies. Little Brother has been so thrilled that his workbooks look just like Big Brother's on the outside, they simply contain work that is on his level. I even created Little Brother his own goal cards so he can keep up with his daily work just like Big Brother does.

The PACEs are all conveniently color-coded by subject. Little Brother likes putting a sticker in each box as he completes each subject for the day.

He uses basic Crayola markers and jumbo crayons to complete his PACE work since these are best suited for his little hands. He will be slowly transitioning to using a pencil, but he still will not be writing letters or numbers yet this year. He has a child-sized folding chair that he brings to the coffee table each morning, and we work together there in the living room. Most days we are able to complete all his work in less than an hour.

Word Building is where the phonics sounds are introduced using fun stories about animal characters. Each week we meet a new animal friend. These animals all have alliterated names like Abby Antelope and Sandy Sunfish. The weekly animal's corresponding flashcard gets placed on our living room wall, and we listen to the phonics sound on our CD. I read the animal story each day while Little Brother follows along with the illustrations in his PACE. Letters are not introduced in alphabetical order and letter names are not used so as to focus on the sounds in preparation for phonetic reading instruction later. (Little Brother already knows all the letter names, though, thanks to Leapfrog Letter Factory!) Through songs, stories, simple PACE worksheets, file folder games, and crafts Little Brother is getting a rock-solid foundation in phonics through the Kindergarten with Ace and Christi Reading Readiness Program.

His English PACE activities further drill the letter sound of the week while also working on important vocabulary, concept of left and right, simple cutting and gluing skills, tracing, and more.

Here is a fun macaroni project we did when we were learning the Mm sound with Milton Mule.

Bible stories are beautifully illustrated in the Social Studies PACEs. Scripture memory work is also built into the curriculum. Little Brother is currently learning to recite Psalm 100, and I love that the lesson plans give fun hand motions for each phrase of the memory work. In Social Studies there are also fun stories and simple worksheets about families, homes, community helpers, etc.

As each animal is introduced in Word Building and English, we learn a bit about that animal in Science. So far we have also covered the days of Creation, hot/cold, and weather.

Math is one of Little Brother's favorite subjects because he loves to count! Right now in his PACEs we are reviewing counting and number recognition from 0 to 10, and he has had fun learning how to do simple matching, color-by-number, and dot-to-dot activities. By the end of the year he will be doing some simple addition and subtraction problems. (We are also still adding in activities from the book Preschool Math at Home because they are so fun and simple to implement.)

The Science and Math PACEs all have extra "homework" pages included in the back for extra skill practice to be used as desired. Little Brother loves his PACEs so much, he asks to work on these pages many afternoons on his own.


We slide each of his current PACEs into page protectors and keep them in a binder along with his weekly goal card. On the front of his binder is his progress chart where he places stickers for completing PACEs and reciting his weekly memory verses.

Here are some final pros and cons I'd like to share about the Kindergarten with Ace and Christi program:

Pros:

• Provides a solid foundation in phonemic awareness and early math skills
• Teaches from an unashamedly conservative Christian worldview
• Activities are developmentally appropriate for the students for whom it is intended to be used
• Multisensory approach makes it an excellent choice for any learning style
• Lesson plans are extremely well-organized and easy to use; very much "open and go"
• Lessons can be easily "tweaked" so that adding or substituting other activities as needed is simple
• Provides gentle school structure and important skill practice without taking up the child's whole day with academics
• Beautiful full-color illustrations in the PACEs help to make the stories engaging for the child

Cons:

• The Teacher Manuals are pretty expensive. That's why I was so thankful we were able to borrow them! (There are many homeschool buy and sell groups on Facebook as well as on eBay where you can often find folks reselling their old manuals for a cheaper price, or you might ask around in your local homeschool community to see if anyone has a set you could borrow.)
• The Manuals are also quite bulky. (Not really a bad thing as they contain such great lesson plans for the entire year. I just pull out each day's lesson plan and put them in my own binder so I do not have to flip through hundreds of pages all morning long.)
• Some stories and activities were obviously written with church school students in mind. (I would love to see ACE come out with a homeschool version where all the children in the stories are homeschooled haha!)
• A few of the stories can get a bit long for younger attention spans, but we can usually solve that issue by either taking a break or giving Little Brother something to color or a puzzle to work on while he listens.

Also, be sure you check out this video about Kindergarten with Ace and Christi from veteran homeschool mom Andrea Mills!

In all, I am extremely happy we get to use Kindergarten with Ace and Christi with Little Brother for K4 this year. He is loving it! He asks every morning (even on weekends!) if we can "do PACEs." 

And I feel like we are setting positive habits while he's getting some great preparation for good things to come in Kindergarten/K5 next year (when we plan to transition him to Masterbooks curriculum).

Do you have any questions about Kindergarten with Ace and Christi or how we are implementing it in our homeschool? There's really not a lot of information about this program online, so please feel free to drop your questions in the comments below.

Here I should mention that I am not being paid or reimbursed in any way by ACE to give this review, nor did they ask me to do so. I am just a homeschool mom/blogger simply sharing my own personal experiences and opinions in hopes of informing and inspiring others.