Tag: kids

Family · Finances · Parenting

Economic Education for Kids: How to Broach This Subject Without the Eye Rolls

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Are you concerned about a lack of economics education for your kids? If so, you’re not alone. Believe it or not, only 28 states require students to take an economics course to graduate high school, while just 35 states require a personal finance course to graduate according to the Council for Economic Education (CEE).  If you live in one of the states with no requirements in these areas, it’s up to you to fill that massive gap in your kids’ education. And even if you live in a state where your kids are required to take economics or personal finance, it’s always a good idea to introduce these subjects much earlier than in high school. Books like Tuttle Twins for kids provide an excellent platform to help with teaching kids free market economics from an early age.

Economic Education for Kids

PHOTO: Tuttle Twins

Books to Help with Teaching Kids Free Market Economics

A key challenge with economic education for kids is that the topic can be boring. In fact, this may be one reason many schools don’t even want to tackle this challenge if they don’t have to. It’s difficult to engage kids in complex topics that often elicit nothing but eye rolls and snores.

However, the right books will help in your quest for teaching your kids free market economics — without the boredom. The Tuttle Twins books make economic education for kids easy and engaging, wrapping each lesson up into an exciting adventure your kids won’t soon forget!

One of the best titles for teaching kids free market economics in the Tuttle Twins series is The Tuttle Twins and the Miraculous Pencil. This book explores the free market, explaining what it is and why it’s important. In this title, the twins enjoy a field trip to learn how pencils are made from parts that come from around the world, demonstrating how people work together to produce products that make our lives better every day.

To go even deeper into economic education for kids, you can use the Free Market Rules curriculum that’s part of the Tuttle Twins series. This award-winning curriculum features 30 units with four lessons apiece. It even covers a wide age range of kids with lessons and activities targeting both younger and older children! This Tuttle Twins curriculum also includes discussion prompts to bring the whole family into the conversation about the free markets.

Make an Economic Education for Kids fun!

PHOTO: Tuttle Twins

Activities Supporting Economic Education for Kids

In addition to the Tuttle Twins books and curriculum, you can also engage in some interesting activities that will grab your kids’ attention and help them retain what they’re learning! It’s easy to simulate the free market at home with activities like the cookie game.

Set up a few different “shops” with different types of cookies and give your kids some play money, allowing them to decide which cookies they want to buy. Set different prices at each shop, showing them how prices vary from one seller to the next and competition drives deals. Explain how quality can drive pricing too.

Board games like Monopoly are also an excellent way to get your kids learning about the free market without even knowing it!

Reinforcing What They’re Learning

When it comes to economic education for kids, sometimes the best way to reinforce what you’re teaching is in stealth mode with the Tuttle Twins books and fun and exciting games. Laying the foundation with a curriculum like the Tuttle Twins series’ Free Market Rules is critical, but so is building upon that foundation with fiction books like the other Tuttle Twins books. When you teach the free market from all angles, your kids won’t just have fun — they’ll retain what they’re learning too!

Christmas · Shopping

God Bless the Internet; a Semi Retraction

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God Bless the Internet; a Semi Retraction

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

If you’ve read my blog before, you may have seen this, where I slammed the internet for being full of weirdos and a generally dodgy place to be sometimes. And I still maintain that, if used in the wrong way, the internet can be dangerous, especially to those who are still beautifully innocent and unencumbered with the shittier aspects of humanity. But this past couple of weeks, I have gained a little bit of context and it’s reinstilled my faith in Al Gore’s greatest invention.

Unless you’ve been living in a subterranean bunker (or, say, another country…) you’ll be aware that the UK received a rather unseasonable coating of the white stuff which has, more or less, brought the country to a standstill. This couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time, as we’re all deep into the consumer frenzy that is the build up to christmas. This, however, has not been a problem for me. I have managed to do all of my christmas shopping on the internet (save for a couple of things that I got at Peacocks, my sister works there and gave me a voucher for 40% off!). I considered venturing out to buy a christmas tree, but with Amazon selling a 6ft tree, at only £9.99, reduced from £32.50, leaving the house seemed a unneccesary embuggerance!

I’m not one of those people who does well with the christmas shopping experience. I hate queueing., and hate people who cut queues even more. I hate the crowded shops, I hate the way the shops think it’s a great idea to cram as much shit down one aisle as possible, making it impossible to navigate with a pushchair, and a toddler who just loves to grab things off of the shelves as we’re walking by. I hate the rudeness that christmas brings out in people too. If I’ve held open one door, only for people to waltz through without saying thank you, I’ve held open half a million. And I’m not the type to take it lying down, so I generally spend my day shouting “YOU’RE WELCOME!” after rude arseholes who think a woman with a buggy is just an elaborate doorstop.

So this year, the internet has been an utter godsend. For the past 4 years, we’ve sworn that we’ll start our shopping early and do it all on the ‘net, and just never quite got ourselves organised enough to actually do it. But this year, I finally understand why we’ve been promising to do it all this time! The only thing I need to actually leave the house for is tinsel and baubles, and that’s only because I fully intend to go to the Pound Shop to get them as I begrudge spending lots of money on what is effectively shredded shiny paper and painted lightbulbs. Also, there’s no way in hell I’m going to pay for delivery! We’re even planning to do our food shopping online, although judging by the shit that Tesco have been pulling lately, we’ll be lucky if even half of it arrives.

So there you go, people, that’s my guide to stress-reduced Christmas. Although, I just know my luck, it’ll all go really smoothly, until I get to town and find that there are NO tree decorations left in any shop, except the really expensive designer ones. In which case, we’ll be making our own.

(Note to self, remember to save all of the cardboard tubes from toilet roll, in case of emergency tree-fairy construction)

Humour · Life

The Ills

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The Ills

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

We have THE ILLS.

I was going to call this post ‘Sicker than your Average’ until I Googled ‘Slicker than your Average’ and realised that that’s the name of a Craig David album…see, I must be ill if my puns revolve around shitty UK Garage.

But yeah, we’re all ill. Sausage has dealt with it in her usual stoic and utterly admirable fashion, she really does epitomise the English stiff upper lip. I, on the other hand, have been feeling the need to proclaim how shit I feel on an hourly basis. Husband is feeling crap too and is probably a day or two ahead of me in the course of the illness, so everything I’m going through, he’s already dealt with.

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Opinion · Parenting · Personal

The True Cost of Parenting

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The True Cost of Parenting

Some friends of mine and Husband’s are expecting their first child at the beginning of next year, and they had us over for dinner at the weekend. We were going through the usual baby-related chit-chat (and I swear, I have tried to lay off of baby-talk as I know it’s maddening for a Mum-to-be to have the same conversation with every single person she speaks to) and we got to the subject of shopping. Or more accurately what they were planning to buy, to prepare for their new arrival.

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Parenting · Personal

No Kids Allowed?

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No Kids Allowed?

Okay, anyone who is of faint-heart may want to turn away now. Because I have something to say, and it may not be pretty or delicate. It’s something I feel strongly about and if this turns into a rant, don’t blame me, you were warned!

I would really, really like to know; why do people have children if they don’t like spending time with them? I was reading a post from a fellow blogger this morning, where she talks about taking her family on a skiing holiday, and one of her friends told her that with the day care and classes for kids, she’d barely have to see her kids whilst away. As you’ll see if you read the original post, Mediocre Mum had no intention of palming her kids off to strangers for the whole holiday, but the fact that it was said, so out of hand, like children are just accessories, dragged out when we need them, kind of got on my nerves.

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Parenting

What Makes Kids ‘Fussy Eaters’?

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What Makes Kids ‘Fussy Eaters’?

I was just standing at the kitchen sink, doing the washing up (I do most of my best thinking whilst washing dishes!), and I was marvelling at how diverse Sausage is when it comes to her eating habits, compared to a lot of kids her age who are super fussy eaters. This week alone, she’s eaten a chicken biryani, a homemade lasagna, a three-bean stew and a roast dinner, including carrots, greens and baby sprouts, not to mention a whole punnet of strawberries and half a bunch of grapes.

It got me to wondering how many other two-and-a-bit year olds eat as well as Sausage does, is she unique in this, or are others so willing to try new things?

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