Your plan sounds solid to me. As far as reality checks are concerned, it took me about a month of doing them before I started doing them successfully in dreams. My favorite is seeing how many fingers I have, but they're all good. When I question whether or not I'm dreaming, I generate a genuine belief that right now really could be a dream. Then the only way to be sure is a reality check. Without sincerely considering that right now could be a dream, no matter how real it seems, I've missed many lucid opportunities due to rationalizing why I could breathe with my nose plugged / why I had telekinesis, etc. But sometimes it has worked and I've just been really surprised, but that's not as often.