So, here is the revised version of The To-Do List:
The other one was technically working fine, but as it grew easier to stay in routine (both from building habits and from decreased mess to work with), I decided that it would be wise to try to work in all the little recurring tasks that still need done every once in a while, but which would be overwhelming to try to check every day. So now the list has two parts: a daily routine, which is repeated all the days of the week and is the main thing that keeps our house in order, a weekly routine, which is more the tasks that only need to be considered once a week and are tackled Monday-Thursday, and a monthly routine, one part of which is tackled every Friday.
I’m hoping that the extra routines gradually eliminate any of the mess areas in the house that had heretofore been mostly ignored–like dusting the baseboards. I also formally added mopping to the routine, which wasn’t exactly neglected before, but does require a lot of planning (because it works vastly better without children scampering about). I still use the principles of different types of cleaning, but I didn’t delineate them in the list because I’ve found myself doing a lot more cleaning-when-the-mess-is-made (which are very short but frequent and unplannable) and a lot less cleaning bigger messes all at once (there aren’t any to clean).
Pre-K2
Here’s a little printable: flash cards for the alphabet, with lowercase and uppercase letters separate, and no “hint” pictures. So simple, I know, but I haven’t actually found any in store-bought packs without pictures, which is dumb, imho, because my two-year-old gets totally distracted by… distractions.
We officially started Pre-K2 today. I wasn’t feeling well, and neither was E, so it was definitely a light day. We started with some letter flashcards (this was before I made these) and learned our uppercase and lowercase A, then read some books and found the A’s in them.
Our formal reading book of the day was The Little Engine that Could
, which is probably my favorite children’s book now that I also had in my own childhood. I’ve seen it redone a number of times, but I like the original one best. It’s kind of a two-pronged message, both a Good Samaritan tale and an exhortation to do your best. Anyway, I really like it, and since we have it, it was an easy addition to our Pre-K2 reading list. E seemed to like it as well; there were a lot of characters (Humpty Dumpty, dolls, oranges) that she recognized, and she loves trains, so even though it was a pretty long book, she stayed focused the whole time.
We played lots of “find the letter” games throughout the day, mostly initiated by E. Somehow she already knows quite a few letters–I’m not sure how! Once we get more into the swing of things, I want to get her to work on drawing the letters as well her hand coordination is sadly lacking (compared to an adult’s, anyway!), but I think that it will help her learn the shapes of the letters better, if nothing else.
I’m also going to start doing sight words with her, but I thought it would be good for her to know a few letters first, so she has something to latch onto in the words to learn to distinguish them. We hadn’t had much luck with sight words so far.
