Kindergarten art, music, movement and life skills

Kindergarten art and music are about making marks and making noise, not producing finished work. The Texas PE standards for this year are concrete and easy to check at home: hop, gallop, run, slide, skip and walk with balance; self-toss an object and throw underhand with the opposite foot forward; catch a self-dropped ball before it bounces twice. Money starts this year too, inside math, with naming the four common coins and separating a want from a need. Honest gap: the site has no room that gets a body moving. That part happens in the driveway and nowhere else.

• K
• 1st
• 2nd
• 3rd
• 4th
• 5th

What to aim for this year

By the end of kindergarten, a child working at grade level can usually do these.

• Hops, gallops, runs, slides, skips and walks while keeping balance and reasonable form
• Self-tosses an object and throws it underhand with the opposite foot forward
• Catches a ball he dropped himself before it bounces twice
• Says what happens to the heart and lungs during active play, and why daily play matters
• Names the primary colors and mixes them to make orange, green and purple
• Draws a person or an object other people can recognize, using basic shapes and lines
• Identifies a penny, nickel, dime and quarter by name
• Separates a want from a need, and knows income is what pays for either one
• Keeps a steady beat by clapping, marching or tapping along with a song
• Sings a short song from memory and lands somewhere near the right pitches
• Holds a pencil, a crayon and a pair of scissors with a grip that works
• Washes hands, puts on a coat and packs a bag without being walked through it
• Names line as a basic building block of art and makes several different kinds on purpose
• Tells a high sound from a low sound and shows the difference with his own voice
• Says why sleep matters and about how much sleep a child his age needs
• Explains that germs are too small to see and that soap and water wash them off
• Crosses a street the safe way: stop at the edge, look both ways, and go with a grown-up

Teach it here

These rooms teach it on this site. No sign-up, nothing to buy, and they work with the internet switched off. Start here. Everything below is a fallback for when you want more than the app gives you.

• bricks — Six things to build with the bricks already in the house, read out one step at a time so a child who cannot read an instruction sheet can still follow one. Every build ends with a change-one-thing challenge: make it go further, hold more, reach out further before it tips.
• know — Health, safety and civics with no reading required: sleep, germs, teeth, crossing a road, calling for help, the fire rules, the five food groups, what is happening inside you, what a government is, the three branches, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the national symbols, why we use money, and the globe. Your Heart Plays Too asks what the heart and lungs do when he runs, and why playing every day makes the heart stronger.
• piano — A real keyboard with the room listening through the microphone: finding a note, matching one by ear, playing a pattern back, reading a note off the staff, and playing a whole song.
• art — Open drawing and color play, the free-making half of kindergarten art
• mixing — Mixing primaries into secondaries, which is the color standard for this year
• music — Steady beat and simple pitch play
• copycat — Repeat-the-sequence play, the same listening job as echoing a rhythm back
• patterns — Repeating patterns, which is rhythm wearing a different hat
• shapes — The shape vocabulary that early drawing is built out of
• tracing — Pencil control and letter formation, the fine-motor side of this year
• listen — Listening discrimination, the prerequisite for every music standard
• wallet — Need or want for a pictured thing, where the money for either one comes from, and the two skills a baker, firefighter, farmer, lifeguard, bus driver, builder, teacher, mechanic, cashier or singer needs for the job.
• staff — Read the Music, first stage: two sounds, and he taps the high one or the low one. Every instruction is spoken, and the answers are the sounds themselves, so no reading is needed.

What a week looks like

1. Monday: one Art for Kids Hub video, on paper, at the table
2. Tuesday: fifteen minutes in Chrome Music Lab, then clap the beat to two songs
3. Wednesday: one FDIC PreK-2 lesson, using real coins from your pocket
4. Thursday: one Cosmic Kids episode, then twenty minutes outside practicing skips and gallops
5. Friday: free drawing with no video, plus a self-toss and underhand throw game in the yard

If you want more, free

A fallback, not the plan. Every one of these costs nothing, and the license tag says what you may actually DO with it, which is a different question from whether it is free to read.

• Art for Kids Hub Free See terms

  A dad and his kids draw one subject step by step, five to ten minutes a video, with hundreds in the library on YouTube. For a five-year-old it is the lowest-prep art you can run: press play, hand over paper.

  License: Free to watch on YouTube and to browse on their site. Copyrighted. Draw along with it; do not re-post the videos or hand out their printables as your own.

• Cosmic Kids Yoga Free See terms

  Yoga told as a story, ten to twenty-five minutes an episode, free on YouTube. Good for a rainy Texas afternoon, or for a child who needs to move his body before he can sit at a table.

  License: Free to watch on YouTube and on their site. Copyrighted.

• GoNoodle Free See terms

  Short movement and mindfulness videos built as classroom brain breaks. Three to five minutes each, which is about the length a five-year-old can hold. Families can watch free on the web and on the Roku, Fire, iOS and Android apps.

  License: Free for families, and the mobile apps no longer require an account. Copyrighted. The paid product is SuperNoodle, a social-emotional curriculum licensed to schools and districts, not a family upsell.

• Chrome Music Lab Free Openly licensed

  Thirteen free browser toys for music, no reading required. Song Maker, Rhythm and Kandinsky are the three a kindergartener will actually use; Kandinsky turns anything he scribbles into sound.

  License: Free to use in any browser with no account. Google publishes source code for several experiments on GitHub under an open license, so read that repository before reusing any code. Using the site is not the same as being allowed to copy it.

• FDIC Money Smart for Young People, PreK-Grade 2 Free Free to use

  Six lessons with an educator guide, student handouts and slides. Where money comes from, wants versus needs, coins by name. It lines up closely with what Texas puts in kindergarten and first grade math.

  License: A U.S. federal agency publication, free to download and print. Federal government works are generally free of copyright. The FDIC does restrict use of its name and logo to imply endorsement, so read that notice before republishing anything.

And the paid programs, honestly

Nothing here is required. These are the programs families most often ask about, with the real drawback of each one named rather than skipped.

• Art for Kids Hub membership Paid $5.99 a month or $64.99 a year, with a 7-day free trial, as listed in August 2026. Verify on the site.

  Good at: No ads and members-only printables, which matters when a five-year-old is holding the tablet and a commercial lands mid-lesson. It also works where YouTube is blocked, and lessons download for offline use.

  Drawback: It teaches copying one specific picture, not drawing. A year of it produces a child who can draw that shark and freezes when asked to draw the dog in the yard. Pair it with drawing from life or it plateaus.

  Suits: A family already watching the free videos daily who wants the ads gone.

• Handwriting Without Tears (Learning Without Tears), Kindergarten level Paid Student workbooks commonly run about $13 to $18 each. Bundles with the teacher's guide cost considerably more. Verify current pricing.

  Good at: Developmental order instead of alphabetical. Big lines and curves before letters, wood pieces for building letter shapes, and the gray double-line paper genuinely cuts down reversals. Secular, with no religious content to work around.

  Drawback: A consumable workbook per child per year, and the teacher's guide roughly doubles the cost for something most parents can run straight from the student book. The vertical manuscript style also hands off awkwardly into slanted cursive programs later.

  Suits: A child reversing letters, or a parent who wants handwriting to have a fixed daily slot.

• Prodigies Music Paid Reported around $149 for the Foundations package and about $295 a year for full PK-5 access, with bells sold separately or bundled into kits. Verify before committing.

  Good at: Colored desk bells plus video makes solfege physical and visible for a four to six year old. Singing pitch tends to improve fast, and a child who cannot read yet can still play a real melody by color.

  Drawback: The bells carry most of the value and they are a separate purchase, so the real cost is well above the lesson price. The video lessons also get repetitive by the second level.

  Suits: A pre-reader you want singing on pitch and playing melodies this year rather than in third grade.

• Local swim, gymnastics or martial arts class Paid Commonly $60 to $150 a month around Houston. City parks and recreation programs sit at the cheap end and are worth calling first. Rates vary widely by gym; verify locally.

  Good at: This is the one place at this age where paid clearly beats free. A coach correcting a body in real time is not something a video does, and water competence in particular is a safety issue, not an elective.

  Drawback: Cost, drive time, and a format that is usually 45 minutes once a week when a five-year-old needs movement every day. It supplements the driveway; it does not replace it.

  Suits: Swimming first, before anything else on this list.

Prices are approximate and change often. Check with the publisher before you buy. We describe and link to these programs; none of their material is hosted here.

The rest of kindergarten