First, we split our lessons into five "blocks" - Bible and daily notebook, math, phonics and reading, CC memory work, and extra projects. Each block is thirty minutes and, for the most part, when the thirty minutes is up, we stop and move one. If the lesson isn't "done", that's okay. We'll finish tomorrow. If she finishes early, she either gets playtime or we move ahead, her choice. Some days we do our lessons in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, and sometimes we get a block here and a block there as we dash from one activity to another.
Bible and daily notebook: Right now, DD is learning one verse a week from My ABC Bible Verses. We read the verse and story one day, trace it another day and copy it into her Bible journaling book with an accompanying drawing another day. She also has a memory verse for her American Heritage Girls troop that we work on during this time. One day a week, we also do a lesson from Grapevine Bible Studies, in which she learns to draw stick figures that represent the main people and events of the Scriptures. Later this year, we want to start memorizing the catechism - which may sound odd to my Baptist friends, but we are using the book Big Truths for Little Kids and we love it.
The daily notebook idea came from here and includes practice with the calendar, numbers, money, and weather- and most of it DD can do independently. We follow that up with a geography blob map that I found here and copy work to practice one piece of that week's memory work.
Math: For math, we are using Saxon grade 1 along with an Abeka kindergarten math book that we got for her last year. We generally do one Saxon lesson a day, but sometimes more because right now a lot of it is review work for her.
Phonics and reading
We are working on the Abeka kindergarten phonics book - again, about one lesson a day. After we work on Lydia's reading skills, we have a read-aloud time based on something we are learning about in our CC curriculum. We use Window on the World to talk about the places we are learning about in geography this week, and the e-book Ecology and Astronomy to learn about the CC science topics. Sometimes we use our CC Timeline cards to talk about the historical events we are learning. We also use literature and listen to a lot of it in the car on CDs that we have borrowed from the library - we just finished The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The goal of this reading time is to expose DD to new information and new vocabulary, so we follow up on these by me asking her what she learn. For the nonfiction reading, I will often write down what she says, and she will draw a picture to go with it (this is a variation on the classical learning tools of copywork, dictation, and narration, which I learned about on the Half a Hundred Acre Wood website.
CC memory work
This is the block that is most likely to get moved around. Most of the memory work is set to music and we will listen to it in the car and while we're getting dinner ready or at bedtime. Some days we don't get to it, but that doesn't worry me. This is her first year in CC and she will get this cycle twice more before being done with the Foundations level, so plenty of time.
This is the time we spend on science projects or art work or planning out what she is going to present during her weekly show-and-tell time at CC. We've gotten the Draw Write Now and the Draw and Write Through History books recently (the best price seems to be on Christian Book Distributors) because we want to nurture DD's love for drawing and these also go along with the history we are learning through CC.
And that is it. Check back tomorrow for the details on what this looks like in our schedule!