Schedule, Shmedule

Well, I do want to be more organized. It's certainly been my #1 goal for the past four years. However, this sneaky streak of laissez-faire keeps rearing its ugly head and preventing me from channeling my inner Martha Stewart. Knowing this about myself, I am now admitting it about myself. That is the first step to recovery, right? So, no schedules for kindergarten. No formal curricula purchases. This year we will continue to fly by the seats of our pants. At least I will.

We are, however, setting a few goals. Gulp. Here goes.

• Fluent reading - This is, of course, a work-in-progress. Today, she surprised me by doing more incidental reading than ever before. For example, "Why does this box say new?" or reading the title of a book I'm reading and asking me what it means. Naturally, I'm very excited by all this, but refrained from pulling out good old Phonics Pathways for extended lessons on consonant digraphs.
• Basic numeracy - I want her to be able to count to 20 without dropping 15. We have a little issue with the number 15. We don't like it. We don't use it, except on rare occasions when DH offers an extra special treat for correctly counting to 20. So, we'll continue to work on that. Interestingly, she likes to count to 30 and 40, sometimes 50. DH explained the nifty concept of 10s to her using some ancient Math speak that was foreign to me, but it made sense to her. We also plan to work on counting backwards from 10 and counting by 2s.
• Basic writing - She has begun to write quite a bit on her own. We won't start working on handwriting until she is 6, but we'll definitely continue to give her access to copious amounts of paper and pencils.

Of course, we'll have time to explore numerous amusing tangents. She decided she wanted a human body book from the library, so we came home with about 5. She wanted to learn about eyes in particular. This afternoon she spent some time sketching the skeletal and musculature structures. Pretty neat.