10 Weekly Goals

I am reading a wonderful book by Crystal Paine called The Money Saving Mom's Budget: Slash Your Spending, Pay Down Your Debt, Streamline Your Life, and Save Thousands a Year. One of the first steps she encourages you to do is create goals for yourself and your family. The important part of goal setting is to write them down and review them daily, so they become a part of your life.

This has long been a improvement area for me because of faith issues and fear. Today I am stepping out of fear into grace and starting small with 10 Weekly Goals. Crystal has great advice and encourage on her site at MoneySavingMom, it has been a blessing to our family.

So here are my Top 10 Goals for February 6- 12

Blog:

1. Plan my February entries
2. Read “How to Start A Blog for Profit”
3. Decide if I need one or two blogs

Family:

4. Hug my family at least three times a day
5. Menu plan for the next ten days.
6. Read a chapter aloud from “Three Musketeers” everyday

Personal:

7. Switch to green tea and eliminate regular tea
8. Drink More water at least 6 glasses a day
9. Exercise 3 times this week

Home Management:

10. Complete Income Taxes.

Math Unit 1: Money

We have been having fun learning all about money.

We began by learning the who, what, where and why of money using One Cent, Two Cents, Old Cent, New Cent: All About Money (Cat in the Hat's Learning Library). TS has never been a big fan of the Cat In Hat because of the constant rhymes, but he really enjoyed this book. It doesn't constantly rhythm and it is a non-fiction book.

The book also covers the basic of who is on our current money which was a good tie in with our Presidential election unit study. Did you know there have been only six non-presidents on our money? Can you name them?

I think skip counting is an essential skill set to have mastered before tackling counting money. TS mastered skip counting by 2s, 5s and 10s last year with the Hooked on Phonics Kindergarten Workbook. Before proceeding with money counting I wanted to review the concepts in a new way. I found the perfect tie in with our mini unit study on Pumpkins with the book "How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?" by Margaret McNamara. (We enjoyed her Robin Hill School series.)

The implied exercise, based on the story, is to take a pumpkin and count the seeds in groups of 2s, 5s and 10s. So after pumpkin picking with our co-op we bring home our pumpkin and try to estimate the number of seeds like Sid the Science kid. The process was then to open it and scoop out the seeds.

This is where life got interrupted because once we opened the pumpkin, TS started to look a little green about the gills. "Mom, the inside of this pumpkin looks like orange buggers and smells disgusting." Then he got the look, every parent knows that look …their eyes get wide, they clamp their lips and sway ever so slightly. You got it ..upchuck central. It turns out TS had a nasty little stomach bug that took that moment to present itself. Needless to say we are done with pumpkins for a long time in this house.

Newflash: Homeschooler SAVES more than $700 on books

How? We simply use the local library for the majority of homeschool books and resources. About six weeks ago our nearest Library, which is less than 2 miles from our house, closed for updating so we had to drive a whole 8 miles to use other township’s library. Boooooo!

Considering the price of gas I was a little testy but thankfully the new library had a bigger selection of books. Yeahhhhhhh!

The other great thing is because of Texas’ library share program we do not have to pay an out-of-district charge (savings $45.00 a year). Super Yeah!

In addition, we have found some awesome homeschool families who attend story time so we are not the only 5+ at arts and craft time. Hooray!

Did I mention craft time? Free art with friends once a week and they even do fieldtrips where you met the librarian at offsite locations. Whoopie!

Online book request allows me to pick most of our FIAR titles in the comfort of home so they are waiting for us. Plus they have an email and phone system that calls you 3 days before things are due to help avoid fines. Tears of JOY!

The coolest thing is at the bottom of your receipt they print out how much you have saved on books at the library.

Get OUT!

This is what I proudly displayed for hubby Saturday.

That’s right Dude $728 dollars in just books in six weeks!

So doing that math….you know I have to because I am an engineer….

Savings on books	$728
Free Art Class	$85 monthly
Out of District Fee	$45
Extra Gas (4 trips a month)	-$16.00
DVD movies rental for whole family	$10 monthly
Total Savings To Date	$852.00

So I can have the Mocha with a little less guilt.

Peace and Blessings