Latest appraoch to schoolwork

I'm swinging back over to a Charlotte Mason-lite/Sonlite-lite approach to schooling. I made a list of 10:00 chores for the kids to do everyone day that they're home in the morning (just basic stuff--get dressed, comb hair, brush teeth, make beds, pick up rooms.) Then on my work days I'm writing a list of chores on the white board for each of them do that day, usually 1-2 household chores, 2-3 school assignments, and practice for A. Overall, I'm trying to hit math in some form 4-5 days per week for each kid, reading 3-4 days per week for M, writing (freewrite, copywork, dictation, or working on a writing project) 3-4 days per week for A, copywork and spelling for M 1 time per week each. I'm trying have them do a lot of this while I'm at work. For history we're going back through the first _Story of the World_ and I'm having the kids listen to the audio (a couple of chapters each week), and we're using the reading list and study questions from Sonlight Core 5 for read aloud. For variety I'm throwing in a grammar CD for M (basic parts of speech stuff, mostly, set to music), geography and math games on the computer, and board games, some of this done as part of their 10:00 chore list. We chose a composer to focus on this fall, Bartok, and I'm just trying to play something of his every week or so. Also, we still read a bedtime poem every night, and I play folk songs on the piano every night while they brush teeth and get into bed.

I'm trying to make sure we go slowly, just reading one chapter of the read-aloud each day and also doing 15-20 minute from a related history book (not a historic fiction chapter book), so we'll spend plenty of time in a few places in history. I'm trying to incorporate the history stuff in the freewrites occasionally, and I think I'll even do the Charlotte Mason thing of having an exam when we're done. I think the "exam" will actually be lots of fun, and I think the kids will also like the closure and will enjoy seeing how much they have learned. And, I hope it will consolidate what they're learning.

Right now we're going ancient Egypt. We just read _The Golden Goblet_ and a picture book about Tutankahmen. We've been looking through a non-kids book with beautiful photos of stuff from Tutankahmen's tomb, plus other Egyptian antiquities, and I'm planning on reading the chapter in that book about the "curse" on his tomb, since both kids were wanting to hear more about that. We're also going through _Egyptology_ and I found one of those "How to draw..." books on Egyptian gods and figures that I've been assigning them to draw. We're trying to be diligent about looking at the map as we hear about different cities and geographic features in Egypt. After a while I was going to have A draw a map of Egypt, and include major cities and landmarks, and have M fill things in on a blackline map.

The main challenge is stay here in Egypt a little longer, and not move on to Rome fully just yet. We actually already started _Detectives in Togas_, our Rome read-aloud, before I had the idea to slow down and spend more time in Egypt, but I'm drawing it out and I figure by the time we're done with it, I'll call an end to Egypt, have an "exam" day, and then we'll really move into Rome more fully.

Of course the list is long of things we're neglecting (art history, foreign language, nature journal, grammar (not that I'm really sold on grammar) and no doubt more that I'm not thinking of at the moment), but at least this feels manageable for now, and as in all things, I'm a tortoise, not a hare, so it suits me to work steadily away making progress where we can and not fret overly about what is not being covered at the moment.