Valuable Life Skills for Fall

Hi, this is Sheri from the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com, where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. If you're new to my channel, I'm a former public school teacher turned homeschool mom. Homeschooling was something I did not expect to be doing, but we've been doing it for, this is our 13th year now, and just loving it. It's been a great lifestyle for our family. I think one of the best things, the best impacts it's had on us is all the time that we've gotten to spend with our kids. I think it's really made a difference in their lives and in our lives as well. So if you head on over to the blog, you'll find over 70 posts on homeschooling encouragement, on reading, writing, how to get started, on life skills. I also have tons of interviews with everyday homeschool moms just like you so that you can get a feel for what other people are doing, what curriculum choices they've made. You can get a good idea of how homeschooling looks on a day-to-day basis in their home. They talk about different challenges they've had. So if you get a chance, head over to the blog and take a look at some of the articles on there. Today I'm gonna be talking about life skills that kids can learn in the fall. It's hard for me to accept, but I think summer is finally over and it's soon going to be time for evenings by the fire with my favorite book and a cup of hot chocolate. I love summer and I hate to see it come to an end, but I also enjoy the change of seasons that fall brings. As homeschoolers, most of us put a lot of time and effort into thinking and planning out the academic work for our year. We spend a lot of time on curriculum, making decisions about what we wanna buy, what is gonna work well for us, for our kids, and of course those things are really important. But I think it's also equally important to think about the life skills that we want to pass down to our kids to prepare them for adulthood. Some valuable life skills might be just learning to make your bed every day, keep your room clean, cooking from scratch, learning how to do your own laundry, money management, keeping track of your schedule, keeping track of your time in a planner, learning how to make change, figuring percentages, learning the different kinds of maintenance that needs to happen in the home and outdoors throughout different seasons of the year. I have done several posts and videos, I'll link the videos, you can take a look at those, on different life skills to teach during different seasons of the year. One important life skill that I think really applies all year long is cooking. If you think about it, cooking really is chemistry. All of the different processes that you use in cooking, boiling, baking, whisking, freezing, all of these things really require a knowledge of how different mixtures interact with each other. Cooking is great to teach any time of year. In the fall, I love to get out the apples and pumpkins and my favorite fall recipes and just make those with the kids. Make your favorite pot of chili. Include the kids in this, let them be part of browning the ground beef and cutting up the onions, opening the cans for the kidney beans and adding the ingredients. Allow them to read from a recipe and just more and more include them and then hand things over to them as they are able to do more and more on their own as they get older. How about making a pie? This is pie season. We like making pies around here and that's something that is a great skill. You can also try to work on, you can try to make your own crust if that's something that you like to do. I usually make a pre-made crust unless we're feeling extra ambitious. You can also teach them how to do a lattice top just for fun. I think, when I think back to all the skills that I have learned in cooking, it took just doing it a lot. You know, the more you're in the kitchen and the different dishes that you make, the more you learn about what works and what is not gonna work. Things like how to thicken soup, how to make rice, you know, why sweet things need salt in them, a tiny bit of salt. All these skills and knowledge comes from just being in the kitchen a lot and making a lot of food. So the more your kids are in with you and doing this as a part of life, the more they're going to learn about cooking. Another obvious thing to teach kids in the fall is raking leaves. This is something that if they do every year at the same time, it kind of becomes something that they're aware that even needs to happen in the fall. And I think including them in this is great for everyone. It can be a family activity. Also, they can help with all the outdoor maintenance that needs to happen. Cutting down your perennials, just general pickup of the yard. Even the fall decorations, this is something that my kids love participating in. When I go out and buy all the pumpkins and get out corn husks, they love to help me pick them out and then to put them in different places around the house. And this is just really fun for them. And it also marks the changing of a season. During this time of year, we kind of come inside for the winter. And so it's a great time to just relook at the things indoors. You know, a lot of times with the summer, we're busy, we're out and about, and kids' bedrooms get messy, and we kind of maybe slack off a little bit on the different systems that we have in our home with chores and cleanup. This is a great time to revisit and relook at chores and make sure that they're still working for your family. As your kids grow older, you know, each year they grow older, they are able to do more things. So maybe what was working for your family back in the spring or last year for chores and for work around the house is not still practically, you know, working for you now that they've gotten older and things have changed a little bit. So this is a great time to relook at your chore system and see, you know, what needs to be tweaked and what you can change on that. It's also a great time to go with kids into their bedroom and to completely reorganize, help them see the value in decluttering. This is a great decision-making process for them, you know, for them to decide what they really value and what they can donate or give away and what needs to be trashed. You know, sometimes I know my kids like to hang on to things that are just like in rags and there's a time when it's okay to just part with it and throw it away. This is a great time to just give the bedrooms a nice clean, tidy and let them start with a fresh slate now that we're gonna be spending a lot more time inside. Teaching them how to make their bed every day. You would think that this would come so naturally after, you know, you show them a few times how to make their bed and tell them that you're expecting them to make their bed and you want this to be something that they do every morning before breakfast or after breakfast or however you do it. But I have learned from experience that making your bed and just doing a general pickup as part of your morning routine is something you just have to do over and over and over again for kids to get it as a habit and a part of their daily life. So this is another time that I think is good just to remind them of the daily important habit of making your bed. Fall is a great time to finish up any canning or preserving that you do as a family to prepare for winter. We do a lot of canning in our home and freezing, some dehydrating and a lot of that we're getting to the end of it. But this is something that is so valuable to include your kids in doing. I've done a couple posts on this. I have one on how we can applesauce every year. This is a family event. The kids have always been involved. They could probably give a great narration explaining from beginning to end how we can applesauce because they've just been a part of it every year. So whatever kind of preserving or freezing, whatever it is that you do, make your kids a part of it. Make them always there. You know, it's hard sometimes to do everything with your kids, to have your kids with you all the time. But I really think that the more you're together, the more you learn how to be together and the more it becomes just a family lifestyle and kids learn so much from all the modeling that's happening in front of them that they get to see when they're part of the real world in your home. Another obvious one is voting. This is a great time for a civics lesson to show them what time of year we vote, when voting happens, why it's on a Tuesday. Maybe you can look into the history of it. Especially, I think it's great to show them where you get your voter guide, where to find it, how to read it, some of the topics that are on the ballot and discuss with them why you're voting the way that you're voting and discuss some of these issues and have some dialogue about, you know, ask them questions and, you know, when they ask you questions, you can explain why you've made the choices you've made. This is a great time for discussions and conversations about that. And of course, when November comes around, taking them with you to vote is the most important thing. When they do this, year after year, they know where you go to vote, they know what's involved. It's not an intimidating process, it's just a normal part of life. Of course, as the weather gets colder and we're all spending more time indoors, this is cold and flu season. I like to take this time to just remind my kids about the natural things that we can do to prevent sickness, things like washing hands, eating a healthy diet. Sometimes, you know, they don't understand why we always want them to eat their vegetables and why we don't eat a lot of desserts. And, you know, they don't see that having healthy, putting healthy things into your body is what keeps your body, keeps your immunity up. We like to take vitamins and probiotics, especially in the winter when we're more susceptible to illness. Fresh air and adequate sleep are also really important parts of building your immunity. So as the weather gets colder, spend some time talking with your kids about how they can stay healthy this winter and, you know, some of the, maybe you have other ways and other things that you do to prevent sickness. I have plenty more ideas of life skills that you can teach in the fall over on the blog. I have some more things that are broken down by what you can teach older kids, middle kids, and younger kids. If you're looking for some more input on this topic, I encourage you to head over there. If you like the content that I put on my channel, would you please like and subscribe? This shows YouTube that this is the kind of content that you wanna see and every time you like a video, YouTube shows that video to more people. Thanks for listening in. Have a great fall season with your kids.