Lazy Man and Money

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

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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.

Our Family’s Coronavirus Update

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Every business under the sun is giving a coronavirus update. I don’t want to this to be one of those. Staying home and reading personal finance blogs may be one of the safest things you can do now.

At the same time, everyone is sacraficing for the greater good now. Things are changing so rapidly almost every hour. I said to my wife, “It seems like each city and state is trying to one-up each other with more strict measures… and this is a healthy development!”

There are a few different perspectives in how this immediately impacts our family. Part of the reason I’m writing this here is that it impacts the Lazy Man blog. Another part is that it often just helps to talk to someone (even if it is writing online). If you need that space, feel free to use the comments below.

The Kids

The kids were already on school vacation for the next two weeks. I doubt the school will open then as planned. One grandmother was going to take them for a couple days. I was going to bring them to a children’s museum for a day. I was also going to bring them to my mother’s house who doesn’t get to see them much. That’s all canceled. With the local library closed, the only thing I think we’ll do outside is a hiking area with the dog while the kids play Pokemon Go. They’ll probably ride their bikes a bit too.

Being 6 and 7 years old, they often get in each other’s faces if they don’t have some separated time. That won’t be much of an option. That will be difficult to deal with.

Their private school costs $2200 a month – even if it’s closed. They’ll do some distance learning activities set up by the teachers, but I’ll be doing 90% of the teaching and 100% of the child care with 100% of the fight prevention. I feel like that we’d be losing 90% of the value that we pay for. I’d like to opt-out of the distance learning and grab my own homeschooling curriculum to save the money.

At the same time, I understand that teachers have mortgages and need to make an income too. It’s a difficult situation and I’m not sure there is an easy answer.

My Wife

As a phramacist with the United States Public Health Service (USPHS), she’s on the front lines of this. It was only a couple of weeks ago that she was dinner with the Surgeon General (along with a dozen other USPHS representatives). Things have moved fast, but they haven’t deployed her yet. She may be deployed to help with airport screenings on Tuesday. For now, she can work from home (the office is shut down), which is very helpful.

She’s very excited about the Presidential conference with all her USPHS co-workers at the podium. In 22 years of her being with the service, the work they do has been behind the scenes. It never gets mentioned in the big hurricanes, earthquakes, or ebola outbreaks. Now she’s pumped and ready to kick some coronavirus butt! I want to remind her that this is the administration that has spent three years trying to shut down USPHS. They systematically added new regulations that forced many to take second jobs and maintain fitness levels in off-time (military do it as part of their work day). My wife recently spent three years getting a master’s degree in addition to her Pharm. D. due to new regulations.

They put more effort in the Space Force. That doesn’t look too good now.

She had to cancel her trip to the annual pharmacy conference. That means that she might have to earn continuing education credits some other way. No one is really thinking about that now, but I bet some will be surprised surprised to lose their license later on this year. She’s been trying to get through airlines and hotels for 4-5 days now to cancel and it’s just a busy signal.

Me

I’m very good with the kids. As you can tell from the above, the USPHS has really piled the work on my wife over the last 3-4 years, so I do almost everything with the kids. However, it gets to be too much for me if it’s too long of a time without a break. They never nap and for a long time constantly needed help with stuff.

I often find impossible to get much blogging done with them around. I have no quiet place to focus on writing. The interuptions break up my flow whenever I feel like I’m putting two decent sentences together. However, I’m using this time to teach them how to be more independent. They can get snacks and drinks themselves. They are pros at working the TV and tablets now. Things are a lot better now than they’ve been in the past – as long as I can limit the fighting.

Besides the loss in blogging time (and likely revenue), there’s likely going to be a loss in dog sitting business. Dog sitting income is best when people travel – school vacations, long weekends, and summer. If people don’t travel, they won’t need to book their dogs to stay here.

I also do customer support for a company based out Silicon Valley. They are largely virtual with many international customers. This should continue to be a strong income for the near future.

Losing the majority of two incomes, and having to still pay the school $2200 a month is a big financial blow.

Local Economy

Most businesses are going to suffer for a long time. That’s a given. Everyone’s local economony is going to feel it.

However, our area, Newport, Rhode Island is a tourist town. They do 75-80% of the year’s business in the summer restaurant and hotel industry. If there’s a rainy Memorial Day weekend, restuarants close forever. That’s not an exaggeration.

Maybe it could be worse. Maybe our city could be where they build cruise ships. It’s very close to the worst situation many could imagine for businesses.

Final Thoughts

This is a not an easy time for anyone. There are certainly people who have it a lot worse than us. People who have tested positive. People have family members who tested positive. Families who rely on day care to bring in a single income and are looking at losing both. It’s impossible to enumerate them all, so it’s hardly worth trying.

We’ll lose some significant income sitting dogs. We’ll do more supporting of great teachers and the local economony than we may get back in return. We’ll lose a significant amount of money in the stock market. However, the key to all that is that it’s all just money. Because I’ve been writing about money and managing it for so long, these aren’t completely and forever life-changing. In the the grand scheme of things, as long as we can healthy we’ll be fine.

As for the blog, I’ll continue to do my best to keep it updated with the most relevant information. Today’s update about our family was necessary, because this blog is about our money journey and this is certainly part of that. However, I’m committed to helping you with your money journey.

I know a lot of parents are being put in difficult situations. Losing day care and staying home to educate kids isn’t easy. I need mental health breaks. You need mental breaks. The kids need to relax and have a little fun too.

Fortunately, I have a couple of articles that can help do all that for you, while keeping the kids learning:

  1. There’s the best educational streaming shows for preschoolers. This isn’t meant to replace an educational curriculum, but these shows can give everyone a break.
  2. If you have Hulu, you can stream multiple Teen Titans Go! episodes about money: 401ks, compound interest, landlording, currencies, and pyramid schemes. I suggest some parental guidance with this show as it’s for older children. However, it’s rare for a kids’ show to introduce the topic of a 401k or compound interest and give you something to build a discussion on… all while making it hilarious.

    3. If you know someone who is staying at home with their kids’ school closed, maybe send them one of those articles. It could be the lifeline they need to get a little sanity back.

Two Ways to View the Coronavirus and Financial Markets

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Unless you’ve had your head over the last couple of weeks, you’ve read the coronavirus is spreading. (If you have had your head buried in the sand, please tell me where, because I want an invite.)

You’ve probably also heard the headlines about the market crashing. I’ve seen some people reminding people not to look at their 401k plans. I see the market down about 12% from its highs and it is set to drop another couple percent today. For most people, especially if you are still contributing to 401k plans, not looking and staying the course is likely the best path foward. It’s a good time to buy in low since the markets have been up so much over the last few months.

Some of the people I’m talking to are doing something a little different. I’m doing something different too.

Last month, I wrote about how I’m managing stock market risk in 2020. Specifically, the stock market was hitting new highs almost every day. What a different a month makes! I was getting nervous that the Shiller P/E was high (around 34) and the markets were up 30% for the year. Since I still hope to be invested for decades of life, I didn’t want to exit the market even though it seemed risky. I thought the market seemed risky back in 2015, so staying invested is important.

I decided to manage risk by selling some international stocks and using the money to buy bonds. That has been very helpful this week. The bonds have been holding up very well while the rest of the market goes down. I also sold off half of my diversified VTI total stock market index and bought HDV, a high dividend ETF. That didn’t work so well as HDV has been hit just like the general stock market. At least I’ll get a dividend check to buy at these reduced levels.

With the market down 10% in such a short time, I took the opportunity yesterday to sell a little of those bonds and buy in. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make me feel better about the down market. I also bought oil (Ticker: USO). It’s down 30% from its highs. Long term I’m more interested in solar, but oil was just too cheap for me to ignore.

The market continued to go down yesterday and today it’s looking like it’s going to be around 15% off its highs. I’m debating about cashing in some of those bonds and buying again. If I liked a 10% off sale, a 15% off is even better, right? Well, I can only sell off bonds for so long. I have only about 12% of my portfolio in them. I was thinking about selling off 2% or 3% at a time, so I can buy in 4 or 5 times if things continue to drop.

In market times like these, I find it’s best to focus on accumulating shares of indexes and companies. If you focus on the money you’ve lost, you’ll probably be sad. If you look at it as your money buying more shares, you’ll feel better. I was paying $170 for a share of VTI not too long ago, and now I’m paying $150. I am able to get more shares. Over the long run of a decades, more shares is going to equal more wealth.

Of course the big tragedy here is not related to the financial markets at all. It’s the people who are getting sick. I wish I could something about that and I feel a guilty about “profiting” (accumulating shares at lower prices, but I am definitely losing money like most everyone) from such a terrible circumstance. At some level, I just have to focus on controlling what (little) I can control and remembering that I write a financial blog. It’s okay to write about financial things at a time like this, because that matters too, right?