How to Make Life Skills Part of Homeschooling
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When it comes to providing children with a well-rounded education, we tend to focus on academics and extracurricular activities. Both are important, but, they aren’t the only things that we should be concerned about.
Our children need to master academics and pursue their hobbies and passions, but it is also essential that we teach them a variety of necessary life skills.
Life skills are those things that we all use to navigate life, society, and the world. They are the skills that make life easier and more enjoyable and enable us to function as productive members of society.
So what are some of the life skills that our children should learn?
Communication Skills
Being able to communicate with others effectively is essential. These skills include active listening, being able to express oneself clearly, reading social cues, and knowing how to take turns in a conversation.
Teach communication skills by using presentations and providing opportunities to participate in debates and give speeches. These activities are usually available through local homeschool groups. If that isn’t available to you, think outside the box and look to local community colleges, Toastmasters groups (for older students), or community theater.
For younger kids, you can do things like play telephone (which is excellent for getting them to listen carefully and convey messages) or even have a verbal, directions-based scavenger hunt. My youngest daughter loves scavenger hunts, and they help her learn to listen carefully and follow directions.
Money Management
Another essential life skill is money management. As adults, we spend a great deal of time either trying to figure out how to earn money, earning money, spending money, or trying to figure out how to spend less money.
However, many people only start learning these things as adults. It benefits our children if they learn at an early age. You can start teaching them very young – even when they are toddlers.
Take your children with you on shopping trips, to pay bills, and to the bank. Teach them what money is and what it is used for. Show them how to earn and save money, budget, and invest. You can give them an allowance or let them earn money for completing jobs around the house. Teach them how to balance a checkbook, help them open their first bank account, and teach them about credit and loans.
Entrepreneurship
You should also consider teaching your child about how to build a business. You can do this by helping them to figure out how to monetize one of their hobbies or passions. For example, if your child loves to draw, perhaps they can do caricatures at local family events. If they enjoy cooking, maybe they can have bake sales. The opportunities are endless!
My oldest daughter enjoys web design and coding. She is planning to run her own business, so we’ve focused on introductory business courses online to get her started. She has also done some Virtual Assistant work for me to learn how to blog and use social media for business purposes. All of these are valuable life skills that have become part of our homeschooling curriculum.
Grocery Shopping
Of course, we all have to eat. Your child should know the basics of nutrition and keeping their home well-stocked with healthy foods. You should make a point of taking them grocery shopping with you sometimes. Extra points if you teach them how to shop from a grocery list and stick to a set budget.
Cooking
Grocery shopping leads to cooking. Start early by allowing your child to help you in the kitchen by measuring (which is a great way to integrate math), pouring, and mixing. As they get older, you can teach them how to create a meal plan, and put them in charge of preparing meals one or two days each week.
Critical Thinking
This is a “critical” skill. (See what I did there?) Without the ability to analyze and reason, your child might fall prey to faulty logic and the inability to problem solve or think for himself. You can teach critical thinking skills in a variety of ways. Riddles, puzzles, and mystery books are fun ways to teach critical thinking from an early age.
As your children get older, discussing current events and the books they’ve read can help them think through the issues and formulate their own opinions.
Time Management
I’m sure that I don’t have to explain why time management is such an important (yet often difficult) skill to master. You can teach your child time management skills by giving them more control over their schedule. Help them create to-do lists, prioritize the items, and create schedules and routines. They might dislike it now, but they will appreciate it later.
Goal Setting
Another important skill is goal-setting. This is a skill that your kids will use all throughout their lives. You can teach them about goal-setting through exercises such as creating a vision board and then figuring out what they need to do to achieve those goals. This could also be an exercise in perseverance and delayed gratification.
What skills would you add to this list?
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Sara Jordan is a homeschooling mom of three creative girls. They believe in literature-rich learning with living books. Relaxed, delight-directed learning is their approach so they follow interests and explore ideas to encourage a lifelong love of learning. Their emphasis is on nurturing creativity, curiosity, character, and connection. Sara is an author/speaker/consultant who loves to inspire other homeschool moms on her blog, Heart and Soul Homeschooling, and with the resources she creates in the Heart and Soul Homeschooling shop. You can find her on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
I would add organization and cleaning to that list.
Yes, those are super important, too! My daughters have recently learned to help with the laundry.
We just wrote a blog post about this and then the next day I downloaded Bloglovin’ and here you were at the top of my list! I thoroughly agree. We have young’uns (4,2,9m) but they’re really into cooking and we’ve just started teaching the 2 yr old how to make fires in our log burner (he lit the long stem match by holding onto it with me at the weekend and started the fire off. So much joy in his face! And we talked a lot about safety). We’ve been thinking a lot about getting our daughter a pocket knife for her 5th birthday or even earlier this summer and teaching her some basic skills (with cut proof gloves on and us in control of it when not supervised fully obvs). These have been much more controversial issues than I had anticipated!
I really agree with the money btw… I got given a book called The Opposite or Spoiled for Xmas that I haven’t got into yet, but is about teaching foundational knowledge of spend, save, give to our kids from very young.
Thanks for writing… we’ll def be back x
Laura – emergent home educator with aspirations of worldschooling (linklatersontheloose.com)