Life Skills Learning Project

If you’re anything like me, you have great ideas and intentions of big learning projects and life skills goals and field trips but most of the time the execution isn’t there. I remember the year we all sat down together for New Year’s Eve and wrote out these grand plans and grand goals.

The truth is, the more grand the plans were, the less we followed through. For us, we seem to thrive in having a routine that allows flexibility for projects, but also is manageable.

For the month of December, our routine went out the window. Our daughter was in a play at the local theater which took a lot of her time, and between that and the holidays we all needed a little mental break. But we did a fun life skills project that I wanted to share about because we all loved it and it was perfect for hands-on learning during the crazy season.

Both of our kids, ages 5 and 13, were responsible for planning out their Christmas lists, coming up with a business idea and a budget and a goal for how much they wanted to spend.

Our son who is five, has been making sourdough bread and selling to neighbors for awhile, so he just figured out how many more loaves he needed to sell and got on his sales calls.

Our daughter and I came up with the idea together for her to make personalized hand-painted ornaments. She is very artistic and has a shorter attention span, so doing something seasonal like this was perfect.

They each set their monetary goal and got to work. Once they had made their money, they made a list of ideas of what to shop for and wrote a budget for each person to make sure they had enough. Then they each shopped and added their items up so when they got to the checkout they knew how much cash to have ready.

I had this idea on a whim because our daughter was still struggling with money and also because I thought gift-giving would be so much more meaningful if they used their own money. It ended up being the perfect project!! Not only did they learn to stick to a budget and practice counting money, but they were truly so proud to pick out perfect gifts for all their family members, and proud they planned and paid for the whole thing.

Taking the time to do project for hands-on learning and life skills is not always easy, but it makes a huge impact. Between this, and a higher level family read aloud, Christmas crafts, and hosting family and friends, and a lot of time for free-play and creating with new gifts, our learning time looked a lot different in December, but was exactly what we all needed.

If you have a fun life skills learning project you’ve done recently or life skills you incorporate, let me know!

xo,

Katelyn Workman