School and Finance

I decided it's time to introduce my kids to finance and money and the responsibility that comes with it. Today I had them clean the house, and do extra chores like taking the trash out and grabbing the mail for allowance money.

When they were all finished and I made sure they were finished completely) I gave them their 'check" which was in the form of play money from their Princess cash register.

I gave them fives and ones. I made them count out their earnings, and then I made them use this money to "pay" for merchandise they really wanted. In this case, my son wanted micro machines from Star Wars and my daughter wanted Minnie Mouse blind bags. Each had to wait their turn to buy their merchandise, which meant waiting patiently and taking turns.

We set up a store like it was an actual store. We have had the opportunity to do this at the grocery store before, but this time I incorporated math rather than a credit card in order to pay for their stuff. At the grocery store, it's a no brainer to slide a card and be done. This way they had to learn the whole concept of payment and finances.

I had them each count out the correct amount of money to buy their things, and then gave them their things once we were all done.

So today they learned responsibility, hard work, and how to earn a living. I want to keep this up over the years from now on so that they grow to appreciate money and to use it responsibly and to work hard for everything they want and for everything they need.

Yesterday we learned all about electricity, and how the Earth orbits around the sun, and the change of seasons. Today we learned about money. But this is a subject I will incorporate into everyday learning. :)

Summer Craft for toddlers

My son is at that age where everything about nature fascinates him. He loves bugs, plants and all kinds of wild life. He loves animals in general, so does his sister, but she is still a little too young to understand it yet.

June brings one of my many favorite critters... Fireflies! Or, as I call them, Lightning Bugs (the hell if it's not "politically correct" I will always think of them as Lightning Bugs because that is exactly what I called them as a kid).

For a project, we cut out shapes of a firefly in construction paper (black), where we cut out the hole where the firefly would light up, we turned it over, and taped a piece of tissue paper (or plastic wrap works too) over the hole.

We held up our fireflies and shined our flashlights through the holes and watched the fireflies glow!

Like I said before, I love to use specific things each week to teach the kids, I will pick things like colors, numbers or the alphabet, and I incorporate animals into this now. So this week we have been learning about fireflies! This was a fun project of many that my son really enjoyed. We took the fireflies outside at night and he had a blast!