Fresh off “vacation” week, I have a confession: I’ve gone rogue. I’m no longer strictly following the suggestions that come home from Travis’s teacher each day. I am so happy to report… wait for it… zero tantrums today and an extremely interested boy. The biggest change is that I broke out a summer K-to-1st workbook early. I’m using each page as a prompt for activities. There’s also now a sticker progress chart that Travis is thrilled about!

9-9.30: Math. The corresponding workbook page involved tracing numbers 1 through 9 and then circling his age. I then used the page’s desert theme as a prompt for… kinetic sand play!

We put the sand in a bin, but the twist was that I hid various 3-D shapes in the sand. Using clues, Travis had to guess each one before he could dig it out. For example, “I can roll and I have no edges,” was the clue for sphere. “I have 6 sides all made of squares,” helped him guess cube and so on.

After this little “quiz” I was happy to let the kids keep playing with the sand for a while! Incidentally this was a way to keep my toddler busy, too.

9.30-10: ELA. The corresponding workbook page involved singing the alphabet and filling in the missing letters. We then read Dragons Love Tacos, an old favorite. Travis drew pictures of the beginning, middle, and end of the story (Little sister was busy, meanwhile, with tissue paper).

The book made Travis hungry, so good thing it was…

10-10.30: Snack time! He decided he needed salsa just like those dragons, which made for silly happy kiddos.

10.30-11: Science: We read about the Earth in his children’s encyclopedia, which features a QR link on each page. This particular lesson took us to images of the Earth from the International Space Station.

We then repeated an old activity, making the layers of Earth from play dough and then slicing into it. The last time we did this, Travis was two years old! Needless to say, he was much more involved in the process this time and loved it.

It lead to an hour of play dough play after, which left me time for toddler music class with little sister, including homemade guitar strumming.

11-11.30: Spanish. His Spanish teacher had sent along a video of counting crocodile (cocodrilo) teeth.

We have a similar shark from a board game, so after watching her demo, we counted our shark’s teeth up to 24 in Spanish. Of course then we played a round of the board game and counted our playing pieces in Spanish as we went!

11.30-1.30: Lunch/free play/TV show of choice as a reward for an awesome morning! Travis also happily did about 15 minutes on Lexia.

1.30-2: Gym. Travis has disliked the suggestions coming from school. Instead, I challenged him to a Catch and Count. On our first try, we got to 29. Well, now he wanted to get to 100! We never got quite that far, but we did reach 50. He finished with 15 minutes of Star Wars yoga on this sleety cold day.

2-2.30: STEM/art. To round out the day, I challenged him to make Darth Vader’s face on his Lite Brite. Not bad!

Finally, at bedtime stories tonight, we dove into the Suggested Reading list from the summer workbook. First up was Amazing Grace. After the story, we discussed main character, themes (a new vocab word!), and more.