Teaching Life Skills in Your Homeschool: Chores, Time & Money Made Easy!

[Music] hey everybody welcome to the Wild Way i'm Jessica today's video is going to be all about life skills for tween and teens today's video happens to be part of the homeschool show and tell which is an open collaboration hosted by Abby from Rooted and Rest and myself each month we bring homeschoolers together from around the world to share their take on a specific topic so that we can really show that there's not one specific right way to homeschool this month's topic is life skills in your homeschool and I'm so excited to see what everybody else has to say i feel like life skills are an important part of homeschool they're also an important part of just parenting in general but the thing is there's not typically a curriculum for them right there's not something that tells us this is what you need to teach your kid so we have to decide as parents and homeschool teachers what is important to us to make sure we're we're instilling in them um I do have a few resources that I will share as far as like what we've used that's like curriculum type of resources but in the meantime let's just talk about our top three categories of life skills that are important for us when it comes to teaching our homeschool and our child number one is household management which also means chores number two is time management and number three is financial literacy those are our top three life skills pretty much everything that we're focusing on is going to fall into one of those the reason that we do that is because we want Emily to make sure we want to make sure that Emily is responsible independent and can make good decisions for herself when she leaves our house household management or chores emily is responsible for a handful of things on a daily basis um that we do not remind her for or nag her for like she is responsible for them we're not going to pick up the slack those things are taking care of her cat so she has to feed her and water her and clean her litter box she is responsible for emptying the dishwasher um and then on a more long-term basis she's responsible for keeping her room clean doing her laundry and keeping her bathroom tidy um because she has her own bathroom so she's responsible for those things basically keeping her areas tidy and then taking care of her cat and her laundry those are non-negotiable um she also is required to do anything that's asked of her with we say a good attitude really we just mean not huffing and puffing she's part of this family we expect her to contribute to it um and while I don't expect her to jump for joy when I ask her to sweep the floor or mop because I'm not going to jump for joy she's can't huff and puff about it like she's not she cannot huff puff and stomp her feet that's not happening in return for those things uh we have paid an allowance I think since she was probably about 5 years old our rule has always been you get paid weekly however old you are because obviously the older that she's gotten the more we've expected from her so she gets $12 a week if she does all of those things um if she huffs and puffs she obviously loses money that also goes towards the financial literacy because she is earning money and she can do with it whatever she wants um and so that's kind of where we have our household management she does not have a chore chart um there's nothing like if you do this you earn this it's just like this is your job this is what's expected of you to keep your room clean to keep your bathroom clean to take care of your cat to unload the dishes to you know do your laundry to not back talk when I ask you to do a chore if you do your job well you get paid well if you do your jobs poorly you get paid poorly that's just kind of the end of the discussion it's not if you do them you get extra reward these are your jobs you get paid if you do them well time management the biggest way that we help her with time management and help her be independent with time management is by giving her a to-do list so at the beginning of the school year I bought a whole bunch of these little notebooks i let her decorate them and each day I randomly write basically what's going on this day this was back in the summer so at the top the like non-negotiable we have to do this is her karate and what time she's got to be there and then I have things as simple as get ready for the day to her school that's required and whatever chores if there's anything extra that I want not the bare minimum but like for example this day um I wanted to make sure that she cleaned her toilet because it needed to be like cleaned not just a tidy if it is on this list I don't care when she does it she can sleep till noon and do it after dinner she can get up first thing in the morning and get it done so that she can have extra free time as long as it gets done that's all I personally care about and the reason that we started doing this was to give her that independence and for her to start learning how to manage her own time we also keep a family calendar on the refrigerator where we list basically anything we're going to be doing um inhouse or out of house so as simple as like we're going to have a family game night I write it on the calendar so she knows what to expect like so if one of her friends asks "Hey can you chat or can you play Friday night?" No because we're going to have a game night like that's not even an option it's already on the calendar um so she can manage her time in and out of the house she knows when her karate is she knows when her archeries are or her competitions like I put all of that on the calendar at the beginning of the month and then like I said I do write it on the daily one so that she can see her time management and be like "Okay I need to have this done by six because we have to go to karate because she's not always the greatest at checking her monthly calendar on the refrigerator." But that is the those are the two big things we have in place for helping her manage her time um and then I will try to remind her at least once but not nag about it like for example hey don't forget your book club is next week and you still need to finish your book but then outside of that if she doesn't finish it she's going to tell Miss Mary hey I didn't finish the book um and Miss Mary is always really kind to all the kids and says like "Hey let's not spoil the ending." Um but we've kind of always felt like eventually like as an adult if I don't manage my time well I have to pay the price so letting her have small failures to learn from is kind of how we deal with that financial literacy is probably in my opinion the most important life skill that we're teaching um I did not ever at least in my memory learn anything about budgeting or saving or how to manage my money in any kind of school um that just wasn't part of our math class this wasn't something that we did i wish it would have been um I'm not sure I would have signed up for it but I wish somebody would have made me take it like it should be a required class before you become an adult you should learn how to manage your money i think it helps prepare kids to save and budget and manage and not get into debt um before they just turn 18 and can just go get a credit card and go into debt and not know what they're doing so we have been doing that with allowance with Emily like I said since she was five um but even before that when she gets like large sums of money birthday money um we used to do an art show where she would sell her art and she would earn money from that um we require that she puts 50% of that in a savings account and then the other 50% she can do whatever she wants with if it's a large sum like obviously if somebody gives her $10 we're not going to take five from her um to teach her savings her allowance is hers to do whatever she wants with we do not I mean she'll ask sometimes like can I spend this or she'll ask our opinion which thing do you like better but we don't say no which is probably why we have over a thousand stuffies in this house and we don't need another one but it's her money to do what she wants with and if it's gone it's gone like there's been multiple times that we've told her like if you buy that we're going on a trip next week you're not going to have any money for the trip and sure enough she's had no money for the trip like that's just that's how life is how it is for us if I spend my money I can't spend it the next week there's not going to be anybody to give me any extra so that's what we've done with her is if you spend it it's gone you can't get anymore um we've also been really big on like needs versus wants these are things you need and for the most part mommy and daddy will cover your needs like your actual essential needs wants that's up to you like that's your money you can do what you want with it um but you have to do that and then eventually you'll need to be able to cover your needs first and have money for those and then your wants second you know when you're out of our house um we have considered getting her a green light card right now she deals mostly with cash i make sure I get money to give her at the end of each week um because it was easier for her when we first started with financial literacy for her to see like I have this money in my hand and once it's gone it's gone i think she's to the point now where she needs to move to a debit card um so that she doesn't get to the point where like oh I can just swipe until you know and it doesn't matter so we're considering the Greenlight card i'm also considering a Vinmo card um those are the two that I'm kind of back and forth um because I know the Vinmo card is free for kids but then the Green Light has some other benefits that I like so I'm not sure which we're going to do but we're definitely moving towards getting her a debit card so that she can start making more decisions um based off of using a card and balancing and budgeting okay now let's talk about some resources because you guys know I have some life skills resources i have a few books and then I have a handful of games the first book that I have is actually a like treasury this series comes in individual books but I loved the treasury more because it actually has some like activity pages in it and it makes it full pages for the kids so this is essential skills every kid should know it is a threein one skills money skills and adventure skills handbook for twins so like I said that's all three of those books all in one and I think it's like 22 where each book if you buy individually is either 9 or 11 so it makes it where you're saving money too um but I just liked that when it was big like this the activity pages for the kids were full page instead of when you buy the other books they're smaller so this is the one that we started with uh which is for kids and now we are moving on to the 3in-1 essential skills every teen needs to know or should know this one is digital skills money skills and life skills so I was really excited to see the addition of digital skills in this i feel like that's obviously a life skill that we need to start teaching our kids um it's probably one that we've taught not really realize we're teaching it because I feel like as homeschoolers a lot of life skills just happen like you're with your kid 24/7 and you're taking them in the grocery store and you're like doing life with them so they're seeing it you're discussing it when it comes up you don't always need um like a curriculum or list or whatever to tell you what to do but I'm glad that it's in there so that I can make sure that if there's something I missed I'm addressing it also we right now have the before personal finance um love it this is a curriculum it's amazing if you need to do any kind of financial literacy you should definitely check them out they have another one this would be like for um twins they have another one that's for teens and older kids that's beyond personal finance we will definitely be doing that one as well and now for the games so the first game that actually all of the games that I have fall into like the financial literacy category because it would be really difficult to have um chore or time management games although I think some of these kind of do all of them combined the first one I have is Payday this is the classic game of making and spending money so you're kind of already learning how to make spend save whatever that is uh any version of Monopoly our favorite happens to be the Monopoly Builder i also really like Monopoly Deal which is a card game um so if you're looking for something a little quicker and you're like uh Monopoly is not my not my thing because I know some families are just anti-Mopoly monopoly Deal is the card version it's a much faster play but still has all like the same benefits of Monopoly when we're talking about financial literacy a new one to us that I'm really really excited for is this one it's called Upstart it is a game of entrepreneurship so you're basically like um growing your resources launching new products building a team like you're essentially becoming an entrepreneur and stepping into the world of business i think this is going to be a lot of fun with a lot of lessons learned a goodie and a classic the game of life i mean you're literally taking adventures of life um I think this is a great way to practice life skills in game format we have the allowance game whether you're starting your own business doing chores around the house earning interest on bank deposits or spending money at the mall this game teaches all of those things and then Buy It Right which is a fantastic game that is mostly um like a shopping game so it teaches you things like coupons and uh deals and sales and I think that is a great thing as well for kids to be familiar with so that they know that they can find ways to make their money go further now I would absolutely love it if you would share your favorite resources and tips for teaching life skills in your homeschool let me know down in the comments [Music]