Today's accomplishments and tomorrow's to-do list

After swim class today we stopped at a craft store to pick up fun paper to make 'clothes' for our Flat Sayer and Flat Duncan paper dolls. We ran a few other errands, then came home for lunch and 'school.'

Sayer sat down and did 5 pages of Explode the Code while Duncan identified about a dozen letters of the alphabet for me. To keep his interest in the game, I gave him a penny for each correctly identified letter. Sayer protested that I hadn't done that for her when she learned, so I suggested that we'd have to find something she is learning and offer her a penny reward for learning it. She thought for a moment and suggested that it might be counting to 100 again (she's done that once or twice, with a bit of help remembering things like after 59 comes 60). I think something to do with numbers is a good idea. Maybe learning to count by 2s or 10s ... Anyway, yes, I am talking about paying my children to learn. We'll see how well it works.

After she finished her phonics pages, Sayer pulled out her family history pages and filled out the one for me. She'd already done the ones for her and for Duncan over the last couple days. Sounding out the spelling of the names and words involved takes a good amount of time. Writing it down takes more time. One of these days she'll remember about leaving room between words and writing in lowercase letters ...

After that we started putting together a time line for her life, but that devolved into me looking through boxes of pictures to find ones she can put onto each page of the time line (which we'll string together with yarn and hang in the hallway). On the plus side, I thinned out a bunch of duplicates, blurry or fuzzy pics, and pics with really bad lighting. On the down side, though, we only got a pic from her birth pasted on one page, and the movie ticket from her 5th birthday movie on another page. Lots more to do to fill it out. So guess what is on our list for tomorrow?

Well, more phonics pages! And then choosing photos and other momentos for the time line and getting the yarn all strung together and hanging up the finished product. Then we're going to make our Flat Sayer and Flat Duncan dolls and dress them up in paper clothes, stuff 'em into envelopes, and mail them to Tucson for their first 'vacation.'

I hope that we can do a bit of reading and get to the history/archaeology books we got from the library. And when Mark gets home tomorrow night Sayer can finish his page in the family history pages. Then I'll consider us all done with the Intro lesson from SotW and we can move on to the 1st lesson next week.

Maybe I'll figure out when to work in some of the First Language Lessons/grammar stuff, too. Hmmm. And if I can find a few minutes to print out the alphabet in upper and lower case so I can laminate it into cards for the matching game with the spiffy new laminator, that would be cool, too!

Okay, I'm off to start sorting through pics now so I've got a head start on that for tomorrow!