6 Tips for the Budget Conscious Homeschooler

I don't hide it, I'm poor. According to the Canadian Government, my family lives below the poverty line. Honestly, I'm ok with this. Suuuuure, it would make life easier to have more money, but I make do with what we've got to work with.

Of course, being poor translates into cheap frugal homeschooling. You can homeschool with loads of money to spend or zero money to spend. I could easily (well easily in my opinion cause I'm a little nuts about my love of researching stuff) homeschool all of my kids without spending anything more than ink, paper and pencils. Some people don't even do the ink and paper part! But, while I'm poor, I like to shop. I am cheap frugal though. I look for free stuff, awesome sales and used curriculum.

There's a zillion ideas for homeschoolers to save money, but here's my top 6 that I used most frequently.

1. Don't buy a several items of a new curriculum choice.

When I first started homeschooling Brianna, I went with Complete Canadian Curriculum books that I purchased from the book store. I figured they'd be perfect for us! As it turned out, I didn't like these, Brianna didn't like these, and it ended up being a waste of money. Now these books were only around the $20 mark each, but when we had several of them, it adds up.The Complete *individual subject* Smart books were better as we could use whatever grade level we needed and they were more in depth. We still didn't enjoy them a lot. They went into too much busy work but not enough detail for the stuff Brianna wanted to learn or do. Again, only $15 books, but when you have several.... (if you're just looking at a cheap supplement though, they can work)

2. The library is your best friend.

The library, provided it has a good children's department, will provide you and your kid(s) with oodles of books on a gazillion topics. Sure the internet can provide you with a lot of the same research material, but there's just something about laying out the table with a fat stack of books.

Some libraries also have free (and sometimes cheap pay) programs which you can use to your homeschool's advantage. Brianna does a Read to Ride program each summer which gives children a free bus pass for the summer in exchange for giving oral book reports to the librarians. Brianna's also done a yoga program and a movie program at the library.

3. Look for used curriculum sales.

They can be found online (facebook is my "dealer" of choice), they can be found at homeschool conventions. You can find stuff that's super cheap and even "free for shipping" and you can find more expensive stuff for a heck of a lot less than the company sells them for new. Some stuff people list are brand new (curriculum hoarders lol this will be me once all 3 kids are out of the lower grades).

4. Curriculum co-ops or just co-ops in general.

Homeschool Buyers Coop is fantastic. They offer a HUGE variety of curriculum at great discounts. I've gotten deals as high as 80% off. They also offer some free gems for members. My favorite is the Homeschooler ID cards. We're cheap so we print out the free ones and laminate our own, but for a small fee HBC will mail you hard laminated ID cards.

Local homeschool co-ops can be a great source as well. Chances are, *someone* is going to have kids older than yours. Maybe they used a re-usable curriculum that they are done with and are happy to give you or sell to you for cheap. Ya never know unless you ask! These are also great people to ask for reviews on curriculum you are considering. If they still use it/own it, you could even ask to get a hands-on look through (something I prefer over seeing a "preview" online).

5. Find and bookmark great free sites.

As is pretty obvious in my blog, 1+1+1=1 is hands down my favorite preschool/Kindergarten printables site. While she does have some printables that cost money, they are all very reasonable costs and majority of her content is completely free.

Khan Academy is a glorious free site. It mostly focuses on math, but also has some science, arts, economics and test prep. We love it because I can assign topics to Brianna and every one of them has a teaching video (or several) to go with it.

6. Don't be afraid to make your own curriculum.

With a little research and effort, you can make a lot of your own curriculum out of your own imagination. Before we settled on Math Mammoth we used a variety of math curriculum. They either didn't come with year end tests or I didn't like them. So I made my own. Going through the book, I gathered all of the main topics learned and made up my own math problems.

Another (that I'm in the middle of working on right now) is how to effectively grocery shop to get the best bang for your buck. I constantly see people saying they spend many hundreds of dollars on groceries in a month. I spend roughly $400-450 a month for a family of 6 in Canada (where our grocery prices can be double what they are n the US). I want to teach Brianna how I do it in great detail. I want her to put what I teach her into practice shopping for the family. No such curriculum for that exists. I make my own.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Real Life at Home.

Summer Curriculum

Here's a look at our plans over the summer in regards to school.

Because we homeschool I, of course, plan to lock the kids in closets all summer and beat them with books. We can't have them socializing, now can we?! Ok, so maybe I've heard the S word too often lately lol Here's what's really going on.

Brianna has a zillion activities as usual! She's doing a science camp next week and a sewing camp in August. Brianna also goes swimming at a local outdoor pool with friends most afternoons. Olivia would have joined soccer this year, but the only group that allowed 4 year olds was almost an hour away, so we'll wait til next year.

Brianna also does a Park Leaders program at the neighbourhood park Tues-Fri mornings. Olivia even gets to join her this year! Unfortunately this is officially Brianna's last year, but I'm hoping since our park has a small group that she can be allowed to go with Olivia for a couple more years, even if it's only as a "helper".

Brianna and Olivia both joined the Read to Ride program with the library. In exchange for giving weekly oral book reports to the librarians, they get a sticker on their library cards that allows them on the city buses free (with an adult for Olivia!). Brianna loves it because she can go to the library any time without worrying about the heat and humidity (the library is quite a hike away) and Olivia just loves the bus!

Both girls ran a fun run today (which also happens to be Brianna's birthday!). Olivia is over the moon, thrilled for another race! It's all she talked about all week. Brianna has her 4th triathlon next month. She really needs to step up the pace in her training if she wants to beat her time from last year. She has great plans to do training and then forgets them quickly lol We're working on figuring out some kind of schedule for her to follow that works around the heat but still gets her running at least a few times a week.

As for actual school:

Brianna and I are doing a joint writing project. Each day we add to a story. Just 10 minutes of writing for each of us. Brianna thinks it's great both because it's something we're doing together, but also because it only requires 10 minutes of writing (she has a lot of issues putting thoughts to paper so "hates" writing). We've only been at it a few days, but it's fun so far. Sometimes it's hard to figure out what to write after Brianna's sometimes scrambled line of thought, but by reading what I write, she's also (without realizing it) learning proper writing style, grammar, punctuation, ect...

I'm also throwing spelling review at her once a week or so. Which, while I find it tedious, appears to be working as he spelling has *greatly* improved over the last couple of months. What ever works, eh?

Normally we'd slow down drastically in the math department, but Brianna wants to "catch up" her math as she's a year "behind". So we're working our way through Math Mammoth's Gr. 6 curriculum over the summer. I certainly don't expect her to finish it in 2 mths, but by doing a regular amount of pages rather than our summer amount of pages, she'll get a great head start.

We are still doing our country studies but we'll spread it over 2-3 weeks instead of cramming everything into 1 week. I had considered stopping them for the summer but as soon as we were winding down with Iceland, Brianna was harassing me about what our next country was. So we'll continue.

Olivia is in Kindergarten so already has quite the watered down schedule. To be honest, I do school with her whenever she asks for it or I think to ask her if she wants to do some. This works out to be, on average, 1-3 times a week. As she's still technically "ahead" if she was in public school, I'm not worried.

Over the summer, we're working on telling time, calendars, drawing shapes and convincing her to write her name more often. We'll also be working on making sure she's got all of her letters down, capital and lowercase and start working more on letter sounds.

Titanic!

Last weekend was the 100 year anniversary of the Titanic's sinking and we did a unit study of all the history involved. From the 13th through the end of this week we did solely Titanic work. Here's some of our highlights.

 A collection of books and movies, both from the library and my own collection (yes, I let them watch Hollywood's version, but only after learning the facts and stressing that while it's based on a true event, it's still a Hollywood movie)

The girls doing their reasearch

            We were lucky enough to be able to go to a Titanic exhibit that a local collector put on

The girls outside the exhibit 

Thomas Andrews

A postcard showing how large the Titanic was

An actual cup and saucer from the Titanic

A real piece of wood from the Titanic's grand staircase

An actual photograph someone aboard the Carpathia took of the survivors.

A model that the collector built of the Titanic as it now looks

An actual chandelier from the Titanic's sister ship Olympic and a picture of a chandelier that is currently in the Titanic (with a sea pen sticking out of it, the girls' favorite part)

The collector also had a large selection of souvenirs from the Hollywood movie. All pieces in this picture are actual items from the movie.

Not the actual necklace and picture, but the necklace is one of 200 exact replicas from the movie and the picture is on that was pencil sketched by an artist from the real one.

The girls putting together a timeline

Completed timeline

Brianna was inspired to build the Titanic as it hit the iceberg out of clay

Brianna researching for her essay

Though it's a little above their level, I had them put together essays from what they learned. They both impressed me a lot with how well put together they we're given their age and writing levels.

Brianna wanted to type out her essay onto her laptop

Linked up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers as our Weekly Wrap Up

Fan-Freaking-Tastic Day!

Brianna must have woke up on the right side of the bed and took some happy pills. School was a breeze, even the geography test. Was completely done before 11am and watched 3 school movies. When the baby went down for her afternoon nap, she begged to do extra chores. She washed the bathroom floor, cleaned the tub and toilet, swept and washed the front porch, took out the garbage and recycling to the curb, picked up random garbage in the back yard. WOW! I could so use more days like this!

We also found out that the 3 movie limit at the library is actually 3 of each TYPE of movie. So we can take out 3 DVDs *and* 3 VHS tapes. Wooooo!

Homeschool Mother's Journal

In my life this week... My life revolved around being sick this week. Totally sucked. I had lots of household plans (cleaning, organizing, ect...) that didn't get done cause I couldn't pry my butt of the chair. Feeling much better today though so hopefully this next week will be more productive!

In our homeschool this week... We`re in the process of figuring out what can work for us in regards to school stuff, schedule, breaks, ect...

Places we're going and people we're seeing... Since I was sick, we pretty well stayed home this week other than running errands on payday.

My favorite thing this week was... Hearing Brianna ask for another school movie. She seems to really like them.

What's working/not working for us... The school movies are really working. When I brought back the old ones and picked up some new ones from the library Brianna was really excited about them. I wish I could get more than 3 at a time from the library though!

Homeschool questions/thoughts I have... Looking into Brianna having Sensory Processing Disorder is opening my eyes to a lot. I`m seeing some answers for why Brianna does the things she does, what new things we can try, what things I would have never thought of.

A photo, video, link, or quote to share...
Just because you have the right to do something, doesn`t mean it`s right to do.

A Day In The Life Of....

I thought it would be fun to do one of these once and a while so I (and everyone else) can see how we progress.

8:22am - Brianna brought Olivia into my bed and the 3 of us had some morning snuggles.

8:30am - I brought Olivia down stairs to start breakfast while Brianna tidied her room and got dressed.

9am - after much dawdling, Brianna came down for breakfast. She asked if yogurt is a healthy breakfast (we've been talking a lot about healthy lately). Sure it is! Add a piece of toast and you're pretty well rounded. 1st load of laundry in the washer

9:30am - Brianna started the whining for the day about her morning chores. Thankfully it didn't take long to get her started and I put Olivia down for her nap (it would make more sense if she just stayed asleep another 1/2 hour even, but if she doesn't go down by 9:30am the rest of the day is shot).

9:40am - School started for Brianna. First is her little daily packet - tracking the weather, handwriting practice, a handful of math word problems and a paragraph of writing (about anything). I started trying to find all of our weather tracking sheets so she can graph last month's weather. The first week of the month is missing and it's in none of either of our binders or books. Thankfully I had one last blank one and go to Weather Underground to re-wroye the weather for that week. 1st load of laundry divided between the dry rack and the dryer.

10am - I opened Microsoft Office to design some new weather sheets since my old file seems to have bit the dust when my computer was virus filled and my BIL had to do some *massive* cleaning. Since the old weather sheets had quite large blocks (that seemed to encourage Brianna to write as large as possible) I made the pages have 2 weeks worth of tracking with much smaller blocks. However, my printer hadn't had enough coffee yet and even after re-setting the thing 5 times I couldn't get more than 3 pages out of it. Oh well, at least I've got 6 weeks worth for now.

10:30am - Brianna started her graphing stuff for the weather. First she finds out what the hottest and coldest temps were for the month (+9C - -16C in this case). Next she tracks how many times we had sunny/cloudy/ect... days. One her first graph she plots the temperatures for the am, noon and pm and colors them different colors.  

11am - I can hear Olivia signing to her puppy in her crib.

11:30am - Olivia's finally had enough of playing and has shouted UP! Which translates to get me out of here!

11:35am - After settling down Olivia with lunch, I harp on ask Brianna to finish up her graph. She'd been staring off into space for most of the time and was only about 1/2 done.

12pm - Olivia's done eating and tried to grab at Brianna's markers so I set her up with some crayons and paper. 2nd load of laundry in the washer

12:15pm - Olivia's now coloring her highchair so out she goes. Immediately boots it upstairs to harass Grandma.

12:30pm - Brianna's finally done her graph (sloppily) and found some lunch. Her choice of Mr. Noodles was just a *bit* less healthy than her excitement over healthy yogurt for breakfast.

1pm - packed the kids up to head to the library. I needed to photocopy some pages from our new Health book and get a new "baby movie" (Baby Einstein) for Olivia. Brianna found a new Geronimo Stilton book she hadn't read and I piled on some nutrition books. Also renewed my copy of The Ultimate Book of Homeschooling Ideas (awesome book!).

1:50pm - already 20 minutes late, popped Olivia off to bed. Sorted 2nd load between the dry rack and dryer... aww crap... the towels from the first load weren't dry yet.

2pm - Brianna read one of her new books while I caught up on this post and gather papers for our health class today.

2:20pm - having a snack of yogurt, Brianna did her spelling test and math sheets.

2:35pm - Got started on her 2nd graph which tracks how many sunny/cloudy/ect... days we've had. This graph got done waaaaaaay faster than the other one.

2:50pm - Introduced the Healthy March calendar. Today is planning healthy breakfast for the week. Brianna actually thought of Wed-Sun's breakfasts all on her own! Then we went through the Canadian Food Guide to look at healthy serving sizes and how much a child of her age needs. She was quite surprised.

3:20pm - She chose to write about her day in her blog for computer time. We really need to work on her typing. It's beyond slow and peck-typing.

3:45pm - Olivia woke up and Brianna finished up the tidying/sweeping of the living room.

4pm - the girls sat down to a bowl of raisins for a snack. Brianna was surprised to see that an actual single serving of raisins is so small.

4:20pm - Brianna went off to play with her neighbourhood friend Lyric, Olivia watched her baby movie and I mopped floors, hoping Lee'll be home soon!

4:50pm - Floors are done, Lee just got home, guess I'll do some dishes....

5:15pm - 2nd load of laundry in the dryer.

5:25pm - the girls came inside to play while Olivia stole bites of bread from Daddy.

5:45pm - 3 way massive snuggle on the couch with me, Olivia and Lee.

5:55pm - Olivia rans away, Brianna's friend went home and Lee kicked me off the computer... off to fold and put away laundry (with lots of 19 mth old help)

6:10pm - Supper making time - chicken fries, veggies and one of those pasta side dish things. Brianna gone through the toy room to clean and get rid of things she doesn't want.

7:10pm - bath time for Olivia and back to sorting for Brianna. She whined however that she'd rather read lol

7:25pm - Brianna brought me quite a large things she's willing to get rid of. I'm both surprised and happy :) Now she's doing the vacuuming while I clean up supper.

7:40pm - Brianna's done and started reading bedtime stories to Olivia.

7:50pm - Olivia and Lee have gone to bed (he gets up at 3am for work), Brianna chose to read school books for her required reading, I called the tax place for the 3rd time today to find out whats going on.

8:10pm - tax place is awesome *sarcasm* We MAY find out tomorrow what's going on.

8:30pm - Brianna headed off to bed and I hung out on my Secular Homeschool board (where they're doing a really cool giveaway for a Timeline Playmat from Charlie's Playhouse!)

8:40pm - I realized we're almost out of coffee (which is a crime) so hoofed it to the grocery store to pick up some before it closes. Walking back from the store, I see flashing lights at my house. *Heart attack in a bowl* Hoofed it a little faster and discover it's just some police cars blocking the road next to my house so a van can be towed. *phew*


9pm - Walked into the house to find Lee sitting on the computer. WTH?! "I wasn't sleeping!" Yeah, that's why you just asked me why I went up town when I had to shake you 3 times to wake you up to TELL you I was going to go pick up coffee *roll eyes* Get back to bed!


9:45pm - Realized that tomorrow is Dr. Suess' birthday. Crap! Gotta find some fun stuff to do!


10:35pm - wow, you'd think with how much hype goes on about the read across America thing with the good Dr.'s bday there'd be more out there! I managed to find a colorable bookmark, a couple word searches and some basic coloring pages. Oh well, Brianna'll love it.


10:45pm - Lee forgot to put out the garbage and recycling... craaaaap. I don't mind putting out the garbage but the recycling weighs a ton!


11:10pm - This mama is off to bed!

I Read Too Much

Finished another book today.... Homeschooling The Middle Years. Pretty good ideas. I can't wait to get a new ink cartridge tomorrow so I can start filing my ideas into lesson plans! Yes, I know I can hand make them, but I found a template for them that will make it so easy, so I'm printing blanks to fill in.

Brianna and I went to the library again today. I finally found her a homeschooling book from a kids perspective! It does have some religion in it, but it's just about prayers which Brianna knows about from going to church with her cousins. Otherwise it's a pretty cute book based on a 9 yr old. She talks about the positives of homeschooling compared to going to school which I'm trying to impress upon Brianna right now.

Picked up a couple more for me too, including a Canadian one finally! It's the only Canadian based one that the library has. Thankfully I have the internet to back me up on the rest. I wonder what more recent books there are for homeschoolers though since the newest I can find at the library is 2003. I also discovered that in the reference section (which unfortunately means I can't take it home) there's a activities for homeschoolers book. Apparently it has over 500 things to do with homeschool kids from 3-12. I'll have to peek into it frequently!

Also discovered that the teen section at the library isn't just fluff! I found loads of educational DVDs, videos and books there. Some are out of Brianna's range, but loads are within it! 


Talked to Brianna's father today about moving up her homeschool date (was originally after Christmas, now approx Nov 15th). He seemed ok with it once I explained it would be easier on me and the school to do it like that. He ask if I can do it. I told him of my worries, especially for French, but told him that was why I didn't just pull her out today. I want to have the time to feel more confident in our new route.

Library Cards!

Made my first major "investment" into homeschooling. A library card for each Brianna and I. I am just salivating over the educational stuff that's now at our finger tips! They had like 50 books just on volcanoes for example! I'm so excited! I found a couple books on the "how-tos" to homeschooling. I'm hoping to pick some ideas out of them.