Day -19

My current daily plan has some serious holes but it goes a little something like this:

Early AM - This will be when my son wakes.  The baby is usually in a good mood at this time and can tolerate some play on her own time while he does a few things. Any daily tasks.  Mark the Calender. Note the weather. Recitation.  I am shooting for 10-15 minutes tops here.

Early PM - This time will be about 45 minutes - 1 hour and will vary a bit daily because it will be when my daughter takes her long nap.  It is currently our chapter book reading and artwork time, as these are things which require intensive participation by me and my 8 month old is in the way for these things when she's awake.  I'll work on the daily lessons here.  The content will vary but it will always include some work on fine motors (ie writing / tracing / drawing), a short phonics lesson, and a book.  The brilliant bit is that I have almost complete freedom on theme and structure.

For example, today we did a fair amount of reading.  We finished up a second reading of Magic Treehouse # 4 (Theme Ancient Egypt & Mummies) by Mary Pope Osbourne, read Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak several times through, and re-read 2 books we checked out prior to our Johnson Space Center visit (The Moon by Ralph Winrich & Neil Armstrong by Dana Meachen Rau).  I asked him to say the letters in the titles and we discussed the beginning sounds of each word.  I actually pulled out the encyclopedias and we looked up "Egypt", "Pyramids", and "Mummy".

Then I got him a piece of paper and some crayons and together we re-created the Magic Treehouse scene where the characters first arrive in Ancient Egypt.  I'm no artist so please excuse our hasty scribblings but you can get the idea.

We first drew the pyramid and talked about mummies and the sarcophagus.  We drew some hieroglyphs like in the book and then he drew a treasure chest with treasure.  The brown thing below the mummy is a boat to take the Queen to the Next Life.  Below the pyramid, he drew figures that were carrying a cart but he scribbled over it because we talked about sand and sandstorms.

Next I handed him some scissors, a glue stick, and a few pieces of construction paper.  I cut out several shapes for gluing then let him do whatever he wanted.  He entertained himself with this for probably 15 minutes while I did laundry.  He wrote his name on the finished product.

I have begun updating my goodreads account with books we read together.  I'd kinda like to start him one of his own but I'll probably hold off until he can read some on his own.  Here is the link: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5879126-kelly