Life Skills Week

I get antsy and discouraged with school around this time of year every year.  So this year, after talking over ideas with my supervising teacher, I decided we're going to take a week off of "normal" school and do a week of "life skills".  So far it's been pretty fun.  We started off learning about how to budget and pay bills and keep a check book.  I created two little scenarios for David and Ana (Abby is living with Ana while she goes to college).  They have a hypothetical monthly income with house payments and all that go with real life living.  I tried to keep it fairly close to real life. 

It's been interesting watching their reactions from being excited about starting with so much money and seeing it being eaten away by regular living expenses.  We are 2/3 of the way through our bill paying and will finish it up today.  They will each end with around $200 left and we'll talk about what we could do with that extra money.  Here are the checks I made for them - I tried to make them realistic.

Learning how to keep a check register.

Abby has been enjoying writing checks as well while David and Ana work on paying their bills.  She writes them to the various members of our family.  She is very generous.  This one to David is for $100,000,004.  We asked her where she got so much money as she is tossing out millions to each of us.  Ana thought that perhaps she had robbed a bank.  But Abby assured us that she "worked and worked and worked until I had lots of money."

I have also put them each in charge of planning a meal for the family one night.  I requested that they have a main dish, two sides and a dessert if they want one.  I also said that it has to be mostly homemade (no buying prepared, heat-n-serve type things)  Here is what they came up with.

From that menu, we had to go through the cupboards and create a shopping list.  I broke down our shopping list and each person was in charge of finding what was on their list at the grocery store.

We had a successful shopping trip and Abby was the head chef for supper last night.  She was quite pleased with helping out and learning how to make things, though she did get a tiny burn on her finger when learning how to brown hamburger.  That made her sad for a bit. 

Today is sewing project day!  Thankfully I have friends who know how to sew and they are coming over to help me sew, as I haven't sewed anything from a pattern since I was in 8th grade.  This should be interesting!  I'll post pictures and and update about it tomorrow.