“Hey Mom. Did I take chemistry?”
“Yes, honey, you took it last year.”
“I did? Are you sure, ’cause I don’t remember it”

The above conversation took place while a friend’s daughter, who did high school from home, was filling out a lengthy college application. The mom and I chuckled as she related it to me saying, “Guess that was time well spent.”

We all know that not everything in life is fun and we do well to impart this truth to our kids as we home school them. No matter how much we may enjoy something, there will be aspects of it that we don’t enjoy, but, oh well…that’s life!

Having said that, let’s consider the other side of the coin – courses designed or chosen specifically because they appeal to the interest(s) of our child. After all isn’t the freedom to decide what to study one of the major advantages to home education!?

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Ahhh….OK now….ah what was I doing? . . . . . Oh, I remember, I was getting ready to write a post about the brick wall that has hit our home school. No kidding, there we were working diligently on homeschooling and WHAM! -  it jumped right in front of us.

Seriously, five plus years into home educating and this is the first time I’ve felt it would be easier to trudge a mile in waist deep mud than finish assignments or anything for that matter. Brand new experience and I’m not liking it so much. We are all so ready for a break, a long, long as in really, really long. But it seems soooo far away, especially now with that brick wall in the way! Sigh. Bigger sigh.

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It was just yesterday, so many years ago, when my granddaughter unexpectedly entered the world at 25 weeks gestation – four months early! She weighed less than 1 pound 7 ounces, dropping to a fraction over one pound! She was amazing. She was beautiful. I was in awe and humbled to witness the miracle usually reserved for God’s eyes alone.

“Peanut’s” eyes were not yet opened. Her dear little hands were the size of her grandfather’s thumbnail, complete with the tiniest fingernails you can imagine. When she would grab onto his finger, it looked like an adult grabbing a large tree limb. Her feet were scarcely an inch long. Her grandfather could literally hold her in the palm of his hand. She swam in the preemie clothes made by the Ladies Auxiliary, but she deserved something to wear. I bought a pattern for a 12” doll and made her a dress. The booties and panties were way too big.

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Friday, I read a post on Examiner.com entitled “Public School Enrollment Increasing Due to Economic Crisis“. Is this true? I don’t know.

Certainly no one can argue that money-wise things have gotten tough and will likely get tougher! Many people, if not fearful, are concerned, very concerned about the economy’s effect on their family and lifestyle. Many  have begun tightening and re-tightening their belts. Tough choices are being made.

The author, in the above mentioned post, wrote that many homeschoolers are considering putting their kids back into public school because the cost of home school is too expensive in today’s economic crisis. She stated she personally knew homeschoolers who are considering public school as an option in order to cut household expenses and to allow the homeschooling parent to get a job to further ease the financial pressures.

For any of you who may be considering the tough choice of putting your children in public school for financial reasons, may I encourage you to take your time in making this decision.

1. Pray. Ask God to show you His desires. Ask Him to reveal to you ways you can either increase your income or decrease your household outflow. Ask Him to show you creative ways to homeschool and to bring others alongside.
2. Consider why you began homeschooling in the first place and carefully, prayerfully reconsider those reasons. Have any of them changed? My guess is, if anything, they have grown stronger. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been spending a lot of time talking about money and the need for us to be teaching our high school students how to handle finances responsibly. Knowing how to handle money wisely will make a huge difference in their lives when they graduate high school and are on their own in the real world.

Let me side-track for a moment….if you read Teaching Teens Real Life Money Skills: What We’re Doing, you’ll remember by “rant” about one of my pet peeves regarding young people not knowing how to make change. Well, it happened again last night. The bill was $5.81. I handed the cashier $6. She entered it into the register and it showed her she needed to give me .19 cents in change. Then… I did the unthinkable, I said, “Oh wait, I have a penny” and held it out. She looked at the register, said “Ah”, “Ah”…. “I can’t take it because I’ve already entered it into the computer and it shows me how much change to give you.” I just sighed and took my .19 cents. My grandkids were with me and were surprised. My grandson, with his sweet, sensitive heart, said “Maybe she’s just tired.” Yeah, maybe…

OK, end of rant and back to the topic at hand: our kids need to know how to handle money, especially in this economy.  It’s part of life, a huge part. To help you with this, Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous post I talked, perhaps more accurately, got on my soapbox about how crucial it is to teach our kids to handle money. Learning real life money skills can and ideally should start at an early age, but if it hasn’t, it’s never too late to start, even at the high school (or adult) level.

Let me share with you some practical things we have been doing to learn about and improve our real life money skills that might give you some ideas for your family. (As a side note, this has become a learning process for our entire family )

Responsibility for purchases

The first thing we did was give each of our teens their clothing budget money – the amount we would have spent on them – and let them manage it.

Lessons learned:

• How fast it could go – looked like a lot of bucks at first, but went very quickly
• How to shop smarter and stretch the money
  • Now they check out sale racks first
  • Don’t buy anything if it’s not on sale
  • When they have time, they shop at thrift stores.
• Brand names aren’t worth the price tag
• Shock at the amount of money some of their friends spend on clothes & how important brand names are to them

Checking Account

One of the next things we did was open up a checking account.

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Do you agree that we as a country are in big financial trouble? Do you think it would be difficult to find an American adult who would disagree?

At every level, from families to local governments to the national government, we don’t live within our means; we overspend. The mindset of  “buy now, pay later” permeates our culture. We are up to our eyeballs in debt! As Dave Ramsey succinctly puts it:

“We want it all and we can borrow to get it all before we can afford it all.”

Consider these alarming statistics about students who graduate from high school:

• They lack basic skills in the management of personal financial affairs (1)
• Many are unable to balance a checkbook (1)
• Most simply have no insight into the basic survival principles involved with earning, spending, saving and investing. (1)
• Of the 6,000 students who took the Jump$tart personal finance survey in 2006, 62% received failing scores with 60% being the lowest passing grade. (2)
• A study of 1,065 teens found that 21% of 18 and 19-year-olds have credit cards. (2)
• Nearly 1/3 of high school seniors already use a credit card (2)
• By the time they reach their senior year, 56 percent of students carry four or more credit cards, with an average balance of $2,864. (2) Read the rest of this entry »