So often we focus on academics and overwhelm ourselves with Reading, Writing & Arithmetic, that we tend to overlook things like life skills. Taking the time to teach life skills is not only beneficial to your child in the long run, but it can also benefit you in the short term by taking some tasks off your plate.
Learning life skills can be fun for kids and gives them a sense of independence and pride that they can do some of the things that grown people do. You can sometimes squeeze some academic learning into many of those tasks as well.
Here are some of the life skills we worked on this week.
My younger child helped with grocery shopping. They helped choose what were going to have this week. Practiced recognizing monetary denominations by reading the sale stickers so we got a little math in as well.
My older child has been learning to cook independently and took a lot of pride in making our family dinner one night this week. Besides making them feel good about their accomplishment it was one less night that I had to cook after work. I came across this cooking curriculum last year, it is an eCourse with video lessons. https://kidscookrealfood.com/homeschool/. This course has helped save me time on teaching kitchen skills because the course covers the essentials and with the video lessons it can be done mostly independently. I can take comfort knowing that eventually when they go out on their own they will be fully capable of shopping and cooking for themselves. In the meantime, they are helping out in our household.
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