Kids Archives - Lazy Man and Money

How To Teach Kids About the Stock Market?

January 11, 2021 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

I’m going to go with a quick post today. I’ve been working on the last update of 2020, but this question came up and gave me some pause. We’ll push that update to Wednesday.

For the last five years, I have been investing our kids’ money. They were ages 2 and 3 when I started. It was enough money from grandparents and such to get started, but also not any money that they’d miss. That’s a great thing about investing money when the kids are so young… they don’t need the money.

Now they are 7 and 8 and thanks to investment gains have a nice portfolio. They also don’t know about this money as it was all managed behind the scenes by me. They know about savings accounts and are super proud to be hundredaires. They don’t know that they are multi-thousandaires.

It occurred to me that they are old enough to keep some money in their savings and perhaps save for things they want. They seem to have nearly everything, but when you are an 8-year-old having 21 stuffed Pokemon is better than 20. They might also notice if I keep sweeping money out of their savings into the Robinhood account where I invest their money. This led me to ask my wife about how much we should keep around in savings. This led to her saying, “Why don’t you tell them what you are doing?”

It all makes perfect, but now I’m left with the puzzle of explaining the stock market and index funds to a 7 and 8-year-old. I think I can walk them through it, but hopefully, I can find a good video on YouTube. Of course, if you are reading this, please make use of the comments to let me know if you’ve found yourself in a similar situation.

I’m hoping it goes well and they can see how much free money they’ve made. I’m afraid that they’ll want to take it all out and spend it on Pokemon cards. It will be tempting for them I’m sure. At least at this time, they still have enough Christmas presents that they haven’t even opened up yet.

Do you have young kids at home? Do you sweep some of their savings into a brokerage account? If so, how much money to keep in savings and how do explain what you are doing, so they realize that is going to be very helpful down the line?

How To Give Your Child An Allowance

October 21, 2020 by Lazy Man 6 Comments

How to give your child an allowance? That’s easy, you just hand them money, right?

While the physical act of giving an allowance is easy, there’s more that you may want to think about.

Should you Give Your Child An Allowance?

That’s the obvious first question. There is no right and wrong answer here. There are many kids who never got an allowance growing up. Many of those kids grew up to be parents who now say, “Hey, I grew up okay without an allowance.” There’s nothing wrong with that.

My opinion is that managing money helps your child begin their financial education. They start to make choices of what’s important to them. They learn to plan and save for more expensive purchases.

Getting access to money is the first step in their financial journey. I think it’s easier to do it through an allowance, or payment for extra work around the house. Otherwise, they may have to wait until they get a job like a paper route, lawnmowing, or babysitting. Aside from this, they may get occasional birthday money from relatives, but those one-time gifts are unlikely to build lasting habits.

Earning a Basic Allowance

I believe it’s important for kids to understand that they earn the allowance. They have to do some chores around the house. It could be making their beds, doing laundry, cleaning dishes, whatever you feel is most appropriate for their age group. Not only does money means more to you when you earn it, but it also creates an expectation that it is tied to providing some kind of value.

I believe children should also be given the chance to earn extra money for extra work. In our house, that means cleaning up after the dog or making him breakfast. It isn’t always clear what should count as basic work and what should count as extra work. We need to think more about how to draw that line. If you have any ideas, please feel free to leave a comment. I’d really appreciate it.

How Much Allowance to Give Your Child

The general rule of thumb is that every child should get a weekly allowance equal to their age. My 6 year old would get $6 and my 8-year-old would get $8. When I first read that rule of thumb, it seemed like it was too much. We cover many of their expenses… why do they need so much money?

However, the $1 a year rule of thumb will make more sense when you read the next section. When you budget that allowance it won’t seem like so much…

Teaching Your Child to Budgeting His/Her Allowance

There are three basic things that kids can do with their money. They can give it to someone in need. They can save it for something in the future. Finally, they can spend it.

Many people get physical jars of Give, Save, and Spend so that the allowance can be divided out.

1. Give

I believe it’s important to start with the amount of money to give. As parents we don’t focus on giving. However, we have to cover basic needs like housing, transportation, and food. We also have to pay taxes. Many kids live a good life. They don’t have to pay any of those.

My kids can afford to give money. I think it’s valuable to get them thinking about others who are less fortunate.

The rule of thumb is to put one-third of the money in a giving jar.

2. Save

My favorite jar is the saving jar. I’ve always been the type to save my Halloween candy for a rainy day. The comfort of having those “savings” meant a lot to me.

Saving money is important in three ways. A child can learn that they can save money for something extra special. A child doesn’t necessarily need an emergency fund, but saving lays the early groundwork for that. Finally, savings are necessary to take the critical step towards building wealth: investing. (Note: Sometimes experts make “investing” its own fourth jar. I don’t have strong feelings either way, since we sweep some savings into investing.)

3. Spend

Spending is very important. Children can learn a lot by spending money. They may even learn more when they make “mistakes” or realize that maybe they should have spent differently.

Give, save, spend… you have noticed that the math is easy – simply divide the allowance by three. If it doesn’t divide easily, I’d put the extra dollar in the saving jar.

When Should Give Your Child An Allowance

If there’s one theme to remember with everything when it comes to allowances, it’s that there are no firm rules. My 6 and 8-year-old don’t get an allowance yet. It’s not that they don’t deserve one or that we don’t believe they should get one. We’re simply very busy with a lot of other activities between karate, Boy Scouts, archery, and homework. The days go by so fast that we never get to everything.

I hope to get them started on an allowance in the next couple of weeks. I want to have a plan of standard chores and bonus chores. I’m also looking at getting this spend, save, give jar. We might also make due with a few mason jars and some rubber bands to hold them together.

Final Allowance Thoughts

Much of this article is based on my gut and only a little quick research into the best way to give a child an allowance. Like everything in parenting, I’m learning as I go. I’m sure there are more than a few things that I haven’t thought of. If you happen to have more experience or even different gut feelings, I’d appreciate it if you drop me a line in the comments.

Investing in My Kids’ Roth IRA (2020 Edition)

October 15, 2020 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

How did everyone enjoy Amazon Prime Day? I feel pretty exhausted surfing through all the deals and then updating that article to share the deals with you. If you didn’t buy anything, congrats on saving the money. If you feel like you missed out on some deals, don’t worry, it seems like retailers are going to roll into early Black Friday sales. I ended up buying about 3 billion model/building/STEM kits for the kids. However, in the words of Daniel Tiger, “That was fun but now it’s done.”

Just because it’s time to move on from shopping, doesn’t mean that we can’t stick with the kids’ theme. Today is the very last day of all the tax extensions for 2019, so contributing to my kids’ Roth IRAs is fresh in my mind.

Most people don’t have Roth IRA for their kids. The tax law requires that the kids earn the income that they put into the Roth IRA. It can’t be a gift from a parent or grandparent. If you have a six and eight year-old like us, it’s hard to find paying jobs for them. We don’t have many coal mines here in Rhode Island and those pesky labor laws would spoil everything if we did.

Fortunately, we have a dog sitting business that is 5 years old. The kids have grown up with dogs and are old enough to help feed, let them out, play, pick up after them, etc. My 8-year-old even goes to summer camp at a local animal shelter. He comes back and shares tips that I have never heard of before.

Your situation is probably different. Hopefully, you can still look for a way for your children to earn some income and take advantage of a Roth IRA. Maybe it’s easier to find earned income than it seems. For example, Saturday Night Live paid audience members $150 to watch a live show a couple of weeks ago.

The big benefit to a kid Roth IRA is that likely make so little that they pay no taxes. Since they can withdraw the money in a Roth IRA tax-free, they’ll never have to pay tax on that money. In many cases, it’s likely to grow for 55-60 years. That’s a lot of time for compound interest to work its magic.

With that all that said, here’s what I did for the kids’ investments this year:

Investing in My Kids’ Roth IRA

I try not to pay the kids too much. I want to be reasonable and I don’t want the IRS coming after us. Last year, I paid them a very small part of the profits. They have grown up a lot in the last year though. My just-turned 8-year-old was invoicing me a couple of months ago for work done with the dogs. (His mom helped with this.) There are two competing things going on in 2020. We’re making less money from dog sitting because there’s little business due to lack of travel with COVID. However, they are able to do more.

I decided to give them a little bit of a raise. They are helping me with a blog post about money from a kid perspective, so can pay them for that market research as well. (The key here is that both of these businesses make money and pay taxes.)

Despite the raise, they aren’t making a lot of money, so investing small amounts isn’t easy. Actually investing small amounts isn’t difficult, but coming up with a plan to meet my objectives for them with that amount of money was difficult.

Charles Schwab has an expression of “core and explore.” That means having strong core holdings and then explore with some of your other investments. I’ve been intuitively doing this for years. I did it yesterday when I bought the investments for the kids, but I didn’t learn that this philosophy had a name until today.

Core – I’ve decided that the core of their portfolio should be the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (symbol VTI). Last year, I bought as much I could and then used the rest of the money (less than $160) to explore. This year I did the same. One child got the high-dividend ETF, symbol HDV, that I’ve been touting lately.

Explore – Last year, I explored with Exxon and Ford stocks. I liked that they paid high dividends. I had an idea that I could show how reinvesting the dividends grows. Everyone has a good idea until 2020 hits them in the face. These were terrible stocks to own with the COVID-19 situation. Ford eliminated its dividend completely. This year, I explored by buying more Exxon (dollar-cost averaging) while it is still paying a big dividend. We’ll get back to traveling someday and Exxon should recover. I also explored with all three cruise lines (Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian) with at least a share of each.

I planned all these investments to add up to almost exactly the amount of buying power they had available. I want to have all of their money invested and very little of it in cash.

The result is that for now, they have a core total stock market ETF and small investments in cars, oil, and cruise lines. I hope those explorations will recover over at least the next 5 years. Because the account is with Fidelity no-cost commissions make it easy to diversify this way.

Overall, I’m nervous about the markets. I was afraid to buy in at these prices with many businesses still losing money. I didn’t want to sit on the sideline either, though. The exploring stocks have all lost so much that hopefully they simply can’t lose too much more if the market does go south again.

Distance Learning Doesn’t Work

May 14, 2020 by Lazy Man 9 Comments

Well, distance learning may work for some families, but from everyone I’ve talked to distance learning simply doesn’t work. Our family is no exception.

Editor’s Note: This article has a little less personal finance than usual in it. However, it is still present and it plays a fundamental role in my stress during this time.

If you are a new reader, here are my family’s basic dynamics:

Kids – Two boys, ages six and seven, in kindergarten and first grade
Mother – Virtually-deployed (at home) military pharmacist working 7 days, 12 hours a day weeks
Dad – Me. Blogger. Silicon Valley tech support manager (part-time)
Dog – Extra barky when not walked 2-3 times a day

Distance Learning Doesn't Work — Distance Learning is the exact opposite of this picture.

I know there are difficult situations around the ~~country~~ world. There are single parents. There are parents who have financial problems. (We’re okay in that department.) There are parents who are essential workers and have to put themselves in dangerous situations. (We were lucky that my wife can coordinate the COVID-19 response from home.) There are parents of kids with special needs. (We have one kid with borderline special needs. I hope we can find out more when doctors’ offices open again.)

It would be tone-deaf to compare us to any of the multitude of families who have any of these problems. On the other hand, it’s natural to compare your situation to other families’ situations. I’ve been doing that with some of the other parents in kids’ school and our family dynamic makes is one of the most difficult ones, I think. In the end though, it isn’t about such comparisons, it’s about how the situation works for you and your family. In a lot of ways, this article is a kvetching to get a lot of feelings out of my system. (I’m not sure I used kvetching correctly there, but I’m sticking with it.)

Distance Learning Problem: Two Curriculums

If you have 2, 3, or even 4 children, teaching multiple curricula is an impossible situation for a parent. We wouldn’t ask our best teachers to teach two or more curricula at the same time. The school recommends that they have their own learning space, so I’m running back and forth making print outs, checking workbooks, gathering special supplies, getting websites to work on PCs that won’t work on tablets (and vice versa), etc.

Two kids doing two distance learning curricula at the same time never syncs up. It’s a bad situation if one kid’s curriculum says to take a break and the other kid is still working. Usually when one kid takes a break the other demands a break. They spend most of their time on breaks. It’s hell fighting that inertia to get them back to work.

Distance Learning Problem: Two Young Children

If this came around 2 years ago and I had kids in pre-school and pre-kindergarten, I would likely teach them 100% myself. I had to do this for a month at a time here and there. I know all the best educational streaming shows for preschoolers. (Many people don’t like screen-time, but we talk about the shows and have activities afterward reinforcing the concepts. We did a lot of hands-on stuff too.) In any case, it’s different with kids who haven’t reached kindergarten. There’s not an expectation of academic learning at those ages.

I had great success homeschooling our kids during the start of COVID-19. Their school was on vacation and we had nowhere to go. I had to come up with some way to keep them busy. We had chess, Duolingo, some worksheets, science shows like Mythbusters Jr., and online learning such as Adventure Academy. These activities synced up well.

My kids are just starting to get good with tablets. They don’t know how to type well on a PC and a mouse or trackpad is just weird to them. Printing from a tablet simply doesn’t work. Using technology in this way is completely foreign to them. They are getting good, but everything has to go perfectly or there’s a high likelihood of meltdown.

I don’t know that parents of teenagers have it any better. There’s a whole lot more problems that can come into play as they get older. Let’s just say that I’m not rushing my kids into social media.

Distance Learning Problem: Boredom

I think everyone is fighting boredom nowadays. My kids have always found school boring. They get academics naturally. That’s their thing. The 7-year old in particular. He could have finished whole grammar and math workbooks in the first week of school.

Distance learning for us is taking something that is naturally boring (school), making it review (they already know it), and then putting it on a video screen. I believe the key to learning is intellectual curiosity. We are so very, very far away from that.

Distance Learning Problem: “Simply Opt Out” and “Money”

Whenever parents say that distance learning isn’t working for them, people on social media rush with two “solutions”:

“Simply Opt Out of Distance Learning”
That’s the obvious solution, right? However, we have to do something. No one thinks that a day of video games is the answer, right? I can go back to my homeschooling plan that was working well, but the school is going to have a lot of questions. We already get warning emails from their French teacher if they forget to submit the form. They did the video, but didn’t know that they needed to submit the form.
Also, it costs $5,000 a month to send two children to our private school. We get a generous military discount (or our kids wouldn’t be there). Even with that discount, it is still a lot of money by almost any measure.
It’s hard to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year and then say, “Oh, we’ll just ignore it and flush that money down the toilet.” We paid this tremendous amount of money for a specific service and we are only getting a fraction of it. The school isn’t offering any money back. I understand that it is a tough situation for them, too. A huge percentage of that tuition goes to teacher salaries.
It seems like the best thing we can do is try to maximize the value of this resource we paid for. If we “opt out” of distance learning, we get zero value for our money and the teachers’ hard work.
“Tell the teachers it’s too much work”
Sometimes it seems like the kids are getting too much work. There are days we start at 7:30AM and finish around 5PM. However, that’s not necessarily due to the amount of work assigned. The kids can fight for multiple breaks and then it takes awhile to get back to work.
Other times, the kids knock out the same amount of work before noon. Their mood (and productivity) during the coronavirus is like the rest of us: all over the place. The teachers can’t know the kids’ moods the next day when they are making their lessons.
I’ve found it’s rarely about the “amount of work”, but the type of work. If it’s “busywork” for my kids, the “extra bored” mood kicks in and it’s a failure for distance learning.
If the “work” is playing a game of chess or watching an episode of Mythbusters Jr., they can continue learning all day and all night.

Distance Learning Problem: The Wrong Environment

I make some money dog sitting and I’ve learned that dogs behave differently when they aren’t in their regular home. I’ve seen it in my own dog. He knows in my house that he shouldn’t jump his front paws up on the counters to look for food. In the first two minutes of doing a meet and greet at another house, he’s up there sniffing around.

Humans experience this as well. We have different rules for when we are on vacation than we do at home. We behave differently in the office than we do at home. Personally, I get a lot more work done at the library than I do at home.

Kids behave differently when they are at school when compared to the home. It’s hard to turn the mental switch on a 7-year old and say, “We are going to use our school brains now.” They have a history of home activities. This is the place they watch TV or play games on their tablets. This is their parents, not their teachers.

I’m not naïve enough to think that they behave like perfect students at school. I simply feel that the school environment is more conducive to learning.

Distance Learning Problem: Distance Learning itself

The majority of our distance learning consists of kids watching videos of the teachers and doing worksheets. The teachers have mentioned many times that they don’t get feedback on whether the kids are grasping the lesson or not. They simply send videos into the ether. I do my best to take pictures to document the work being done – mistakes and all. For the kids, it simply isn’t the same as learning the lesson in real time with their peers.

Some of the websites can help because teachers get reports on what the students are getting right and wrong.

Distance Learning Problem: Fighting for that Silver Lining

I spent a very, very long time trying to come up with any kind of silver lining to distance learning. I needed to feel like there’s something of value here. The closest I came is that distance learning allows for students to learn at their own pace. If a student learns faster, they can move on to the next thing. If a student needs more help, some extra review may be necessary.

The curriculum doesn’t have to match the general class speed. It can be fluid for each individual. If some whiz kid can blast through a grade of Khan Academy in a month, maybe he/she can move onto the next grade. One of our kids seems to be that kind of whiz kid.

It took our school a ton of work just to take the curriculum and move it online. They did it very quickly. I’m sure they would say that I should be happy we have what we have. It’s better than a lot of schools.

Unfortunately, I keep going back to what I could teach if only I had the power to adapt the curriculum. If I’m going to spend my time teaching, I should have a say on the curriculum and pace. A famous football coach, Bill Parcells, once said, “If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.” He was referring to the ability to draft his own players, but I think it works here.

For us, I think that distance learning can only work if teachers act like consultants proposing ideas and parents are the ones choosing what to implement. Of course, both parents and teachers have to work towards a common goal of preparing the children for the next grade.

Hopefully by fall, the kids will be back in school. (I’m not optimistic.) Failing that, I’d like to see some individualization take place. Maybe I can convince the school to have my kids do an “independent” study. However, once again, it’s hard to pay all this money simply to ignore the resource.

Final Thoughts: Why Distance Learning Doesn’t Work

Every family is different. Some families may have no problems with distance learning. However, I think almost everyone finds it extremely difficult. Our particular family and school situation makes for one of those difficult situations.

I honestly don’t know what to do about the fall. It doesn’t look like schools are going to open up. The CA State University System has announced it will be online. Dr. Anthony Fauci said that having a vaccine or treatments that would allow for schools to open up is “a bridge too far.”

We have to prepare for the most likely scenario that schools won’t open up in the fall. Do we voluntarily throw tens of thousands of dollars at something that we know doesn’t work? If we decide not to, we’ll lose the ability to send our kids to the best school for years. We’ve valued this school tremendously (when the campus was open).

There are no easy answers here. I don’t even see a clear way to make the best of a bad situation.

This is the biggest stress in my life… and it looks like I’m going to be stuck with it for at least the rest of the 2020.

How I Homeschooled Our First Graders During the COVID-19 “Vacation”

April 7, 2020 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

First Grade Homeschooling — This is the spreadsheet of ideas that we used. Create your own and share it with me in the comments please!

I took a little creative liberty with the title. The “COVID-19 ‘Vacation'” refers to the two weeks my kids were on their normal “vacation” from school, but we were physically distancing at home. For them, this was their regularly-planned vacation. When the school was scheduled to start back up again, they had a distance learning curriculum. There’s nothing about COVID-19 that should be considered a vacation.

Additionally, we have a kindergartner and a first grader. That’s too long for the title, so I simplified it. For practical purposes, I would consider most of the activities below appropriate for students ranging from K-2.

As a financial blogger, I need to bring money into the mix. Many of these options were cheap or even free. Some were part of things that we paid for anyway (before COVID-19), such as Netflix and Hulu.

Finally, I’m taking most of the credit of this, so I often write in the first person. My wife’s US Public Health Service work has been very, very, busy as you might imagine. It’s actually been extremely busy for a few years, so I’ve taken it upon myself to be an amateur educator at night as a hobby. A passion for learning and access to the internet can take you very far nowadays. (My wife, as a pharmacist, did find some time to run an amazing class on the three states of matter: gases, liquids, and solids. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any litmus paper handy for a second class.)

That’s more than enough qualification, let’s get started!

Kindergarten to Second Grade Homeschooling

With our travel plans cancelled, we found it better to focus more on an academic vacation than we normally would have. Otherwise the kids would have just been watching TV and playing video games. That’s like just eating chocolate for 2 weeks straight. It’s not healthy.

It turns out that I was well-prepared for homeschooling. There are many parents who do this full time, so they are much better than I am. However, I’m a bit of a tiger dad and I buy a lot of educational thing like place-value charts and fraction cubes. (This is a good time to mention that if you buy some of the items listed, I may get a small commission.) I particularly like that place-value chart because as long as your net worth is under 10 million, you can display it and no one will know what it represents.

One of the most important goals was to disguise the learning parts as much as possible. The kids know they are on vacation. COVID-19 robbed them of their fun time, they shouldn’t feel penalized with tedious school work. As part of that, we mostly alternated between a learning activity and their own free choice, which was often a Pokemon show, but other times it was something to get their body moving, when possible.

There were times when I needed a break. For those times, I put together a list of a few educational shows that are also entertaining for them. I’m not against screen-time as long as it’s educational screen-time. Some of our favorite shows included: Oddsquad (PBS), Ruff Ruffman (PBS available on Amazon Prime), Brainchild (Netflix), Mythbusters Jr. (Hulu), and Warren Buffett’s Secret Millionaire’s Club (stream for free).

I had previously gotten a first and second grade workbook (over 300 pages each) from Aldi. They cover all kinds of topics – obviously reading and math, but also things like fact vs. opinion. I find that these tend to be a little easier than their school’s curriculum, so my kindergartner did some of the first grade worksheets with a little guidance (such as reading the instructions). My first grader works well with the second grade book. This is an example of what the books look like. I tricked my kindergartner into doing some of the easiest second grade sheets, because I thought he could handle the math (his strong suit). These books were about $4-5 each and in retrospect some of the best money I’ve spent.

The key to make this not feel like work is that they got earned a tally (or a sticker system) for each sheet. When they’ve collected 10 tallys (or stickers), they got a reward. One reward was Minecraft for their Amazon Fire HD 10s. Another reward was a box of Pokemon cards. I give them a budget and let them decide to combine their money for a bigger gift to share or buy separately.

I also introduced the kids to Prodigy Math. It’s a knock-off of Pokemon with pets that you can collect, power-up, and battle with. However, you “battle” by answering math facts correctly. It’s free, but there’s a heavy push to pay so that your pets can evolve. This is actually part of the kids’ school’s third grade curriculum (but that would be with more difficult math).

The kids’ school teaches French, even at this young age. My school didn’t have foreign language until I was in the 7th grade! I got their Fire HD 10 (my Fire 10 HD review) set up with Duolingo. I wanted them to continue with French, but they prefer Japanese. Either they want to learn what I’m learning or they really want to work for Gamefreak and invent new Pokemon one day. I’m fine if they prefer Japanese. There’s not much to make this interesting for them other than to continue the daily streak. I have been thinking about giving them money for earning Experience Points (XP) once a month. I’m worried about setting a dangerous precedent of paying for academic activity though.

The kids had a daily chess match. My kindergartner is better at math and spatial thinking, so he can compete well with my first grader, despite the 15 month age difference. I gave them some simple strategies and scoring (adding up the value of chess pieces). I followed the games and suggest moves they could have done differently and why. Eventually, I got them each a chess app for their tablets so they could play even if the other didn’t want to.

It may sound silly to mention, but we also simply read books. We had already read most of the books in our house multiple times (and we have so, so many books). So I got the Libby app, which has a lot of eBooks.

We worked on solving a 2×2 Rubik’s Cube as well. I found a deal on one awhile back and it hadn’t been used much (except by me). There are great instructions online on how to solve it. If you have a kid who loves puzzles, this is a good activity. It also teaches them how to follow directions. The kids also love to build Mega Construx Pokemon. (Yes, you’ll notice the Pokemon theme again and again.) It’s also great for following instructions – just like building model cars when I was a kid. We’ve got quite the collection of Mega Construx Pokemon now – gotta build them all!

We are also learning a lot of home skills such as cooking and laundry. I find that cooking has a lot of learning opportunities. Lots of measuring, fractions, and science all rolled into a practical life skill. I wanted them to learn how to do laundry, because they can help lighten the load and share my misery ;).

For physical education, the school had suggested Cosmic Kids Yoga on YouTube. Yes, there’s a Pokemon-themed Yoga there too. We take our dog on daily walks down some hiking local paths which is great for fresh air, social distancing, and sunshine. In certain places, I let the kids use their phones to play Pokemon Go (my phone is a mobile hotspot – they have old hand-me-down phones that just connect to mine via wifi). There’s a lot of math and game logic involved in Pokemon Go and they are excited about it. We tried to get bike riding and scootering in, but the weather didn’t cooperate as much as we’d like.

Kindergarten Homeschooling Tips

There were some activities (not a lot as you’ll see) that worked better for my kindergartner.

We slowly went through the start of Rebecca Sitton’s 1200 word list of high frequency words. My youngest could do about about 85% of the first 120. I circled the ones he needed help with and did a review with them a few days later. We stopped there. I didn’t want to go too far with this list – it may have gotten difficult and frustrating. I think most of these words are part of the first grade curriculum anyway, so he should be ready for a good start next year.

Khan Academy Kids has a free app that reads the books with the words being highlighted. This was useful, because it helped him see the words as they were being read. Unfortunately, the rest of the app was geared towards younger kids. My first grader can read very well, so this app wasn’t useful for him.

First Grade Homeschooling Tips

Just like the kindergarten homeschooling tips above, some of the things worked better for my first grader. This is where it pays to know your kids’ strengths and weaknesses, it will help you guide them to things that are challenging, but not frustrating.

In fact, there was really only thing that fit my first grader better than my kindergartner. Adventure Academy was available for free from some deal sites at the start of the school closures. It seems that access was taken away and maybe the code was for another school system and not meant for the general public. It’s geared for grades 3-8, but my first grader could get started and do most of the academic activities he came across. He learned about similes vs. metaphors for example. He would play with it for about 90 minutes a couple of times and then put it away for days and say it was “boring learning.”

I had high hopes that if the gamification aspect worked, he’d be able to learn at his own pace, which is far faster than I can keep up with. Normally, this costs anywhere from around $60 to $90 a year. I was afraid to invest in it because technically their Fire HD 10s are not supported and they don’t have laptops. However, the Fire HD 10s worked decently through the Google Play store that was side-loaded on them. Very rarely, it was a little slow. Amazon’s Fire HD 10s now have an upgraded processor, so if you have the latest one it will probably work fine.

Final First Grade Homeschooling Tips

There are so many lists of resources out there, especially now. It’s OVERLOAD! It simply isn’t reasonable for any parent or child to explore them all. That’s why I’m writing a curated version of what worked for us.

It was also especially helpful to keep a spreadsheet (or even a simple list) of things that worked. For example, I had forgotten about Secret Millionaire’s Club until I reviewed the spreadsheet to write this article. That’s my Google Sheet at the top of this article. What I like about having a spreadsheet is that I can sort for different types of activities like art or give myself a break by sorting for television. It took me only a few minutes to create this spreadsheet. It could easily be dozens and dozens of items if I needed more. However, a few staples that we could do everyday (chess and worksheets) and some variety went a long way.

If you are looking for more inspiration there are numerous suggestions in this Slickdeals post, this OneTab page, and Wide Open School. I’d recommend the last one, Wide Open School, as it’s powered by the trusted brand of Common Sense Media and a bunch of other brands you might have heard of like Sesame Street, PBS, Nick Jr., National Geographic, Scholastic, etc. It would be my “Lazy” recommendation.

Unfortunately educating children is another case in life where there’s no “one size fits all.” Hopefully this article gave you some ideas on how to combine learning and fun. I hope even more that we can get back to school and work making this purely supplemental. If your school is doing a good job with distance learning now and you don’t need any new ideas, maybe save it for the summer.