Teaching Your Children Life Skills

Getting Organized:
In your home and homeschool

    
Teaching Your Children Life Skills

We teach our children from books, but we also teach them through living life. Having a balance between book learning and real-life learning will help your children be ready for adulthood. My goal has always been to ignite a love of learning in my children and give them the tools to find the answers they need. Even as adults, we are still learning.

When I am teaching my children life skills, I use the teamwork approach to everything we do around the house. We have a great support system for getting things done. We do laundry from start to finish together from the time they are young. By the time they are teenagers, they are able to do their own laundry each week and wash their bedding. This is an essential skill for when they move out of the family home.

We menu plan, shop, and cook together. When we finish a meal, we work together to clean up. We rotate through who does what aspect of the cooking and cleaning, so they have a good knowledge base of the whole system. I teach them how to follow a recipe, and there have been times when I let them follow a recipe incorrectly. They learned valuable lessons from that. It’s easy to jump in and rescue them, but it is so much better for their learning process if they make a mistake and learn from it. I have one teenager who can take basic ingredients and create a tasty meal from them without a recipe to follow. We all like it when he is the Head Chef of the Day.

Another way we learn together is in doing our Home Blessings. We do a different task each day, and we rotate who does which task. That way, each one of them is exposed to all aspects of cleaning a house. The biggest lesson they learned was that it is much easier to clean the house if you pick up behind yourself each day. They also learned that they have to sweep less if they clean their shoes off before they come into the house. A lot of the things we do or don’t do around the house are cause and effect situations.

We also work together on home maintenance and home renovation projects. This has really helped them figure out things they really enjoy that they are good at doing. We have pulled up flooring and painted, and we have done routine things such as cleaning gutters and changing air filters. If I have a project around the house, I always invite one or more of them to help me. From this, I have gained a hair stylist, a plumber, and a landscaper. Three of my children have found things they are very good at doing, and they get paid for doing it.

They have also been taught basic car maintenance and safety. It’s important that they know how to handle basic car maintenance and know when to take a vehicle to a mechanic. One of my children is fascinated with engines and has taken a small engine repair class. He had great satisfaction in taking a non-working engine from a junk yard and fixing it. The joy on his face when the engine cranked was amazing.

Teenagers also need to know how to budget and do basic bookkeeping functions. Once they move out of the house, they are responsible for making money and paying their bills. It is important that they learn these skills while they still have the safety net of living at home. We talk about savings accounts, checking accounts, debit cards, and credit cards.

Everything I do to teach my children is geared toward helping them to be ready for adulthood. So far we have two young adult children who live on their own and have jobs they love.

Today’s Zone Mission is to toss old cosmetics and declutter 1 bathroom drawer.

Your Home Blessing for today is to dust and vacuum.

My menu plan for Tuesday is cheeseburger bake.
Have a blessed day!
FB Cover - Tami Fox

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About Tami

Tami Fox is a homeschool mom of 6, who in age from 26 to 11. She and her husband have homeschooled for 17 years and have graduated three of their children from their homeschool. They are currently homeschooling 3 boys who are in grades 11, 9, and 6. They use hands-on learning and unit studies to ignite the fire of learning in their children. Tami is a homeschool author and conference speaker. You can contact her by email at Tami@TamiFox.com. Buy her book, Giving Your Children Wings at https://tamifox.net/giving-your-children-wings/.

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