In recent years especially, homeschooling children has become an increasingly popular method of providing kids with the education they need to gain wealth and success in their future. If you know where to look, there are countless resources to support your child’s continuous scholastic environment outside of a traditional public or private school setting. Marco Santarelli is joined by Sherry, a retired Fortune 100 healthcare executive, and a local homeschool mom who’s active in her community. Sherry talks about the joys of homeschooling your children, and the flexibility that such a system affords your child’s education. There are plenty of benefits to homeschooling, so if you’ve ever considered it, Sherry can provide a great primer to start today.
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Homeschooling For Wealth And Success
Mark Twain once said, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” The genius writer and the father of American literature was not educated beyond elementary school. He expressed cynicism toward the mediocre education system in his many quotes about education. He believed that schooling was different from education and learning. He warned us of the hazards of following the education system with completely blind faith. Education is more important now than it has been at any other time in history. As we leave the industrial age behind and continue through the information age, the value of education continues to increase. Is the education system that you or your children receive in the school system now adequate enough to meet the challenges of this so-called brave new world?
The education system covers two main areas, academic and professional, but we need more new education. It’s what I call the third leg of the stool or financial education. That’s the education that you turn to, to turn the money you earn from your job or profession into lifelong wealth and financial security. As Robert Kiyosaki says, “The rules have changed.” In the industrial age, the rules were go to school, get good grades, find a safe and secure job with benefits, and then stay there your whole life. After many years, you retire from the company and hopefully, the company will give you a pension and the government would take care of you for the rest of your life. That’s not true nowadays. It hasn’t been true for decades.
The rules are go to school, get good grades, find a job, and then retrain yourself for a new job or career. You find yourself a new company and a new job and you retrain again. This could go on multiple times in a person’s lifetime. Think about all the people that you know that have gone from one job or career and after some time, that could be even a decade or more, they’ve changed their career path. They’re doing something completely different. All along, you’re hopping or at least hoping you have enough money set aside to last you well into your senior years. I’ve had some people reach out to me asking me about homeschooling. In case you don’t know, we’ve homeschooled our daughter, Angelina, since first grade. I’ve decided to interview 1 or 2 homeschool moms here in Orange County where I live. My wife ended up introducing me to a few of them from one of her local homeschool groups.
This episode should be of interest to you whether you homeschool or not, whether you’re thinking about it or not. At the core of it is your ability to provide your kids with the best possible education, boost their confidence and help give them financial education. The financial education that they need and deserve to have, the wealth mindset that you want them to have and to be able to get ahead in the world financially. Throughout this episode and towards the end, I’m going to share some resources that we’ve used over the years in our homeschooling journey. I want to emphasize that homeschooling is part art and part science.
There is no one right or wrong way to go about it. That’s the beautiful thing about it. It offers you the freedom and flexibility to provide the quality education and experience that you want it to while at the same time, it allows you to adjust and improve how your children benefit from it. I hope this episode gives you a good introduction, some new perspective and answers to some of your questions. Beyond that, there is a lot of good free information that you can gather both online and offline. There is a ton of it. If you enjoy this episode, please remember to share it with your spouse, your family and your friends. Those that you care about.
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It’s my pleasure to welcome Sherry to the show. For those of you who don’t know Sherry, and I don’t expect anybody to know Sherry, she is a local homeschool mom who is active in the community. My wife knows her. She was one of the ladies that my wife recommended that I interview for this homeschooling special. What I do know about Sherry is she’s very knowledgeable about homeschooling and she’s a retired Fortune 100 healthcare executive. Sherry, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
I am excited to have you on here. I’ve had many people ask me about homeschooling. How do you do it? Where do you start? What resources do you use? How do you build a wealth mindset? I thought I need to have an episode about homeschooling. I got thinking, “This wasn’t my idea. I can’t take credit for this.” My wife said, “Why don’t you interview one of the homeschool moms?” I thought, “That’s a great idea.” She puts me in touch with a few people including yourself, and you graciously agreed to come on. I’m thankful for that. Sherry, why don’t we begin with you telling us a little bit about yourself so we know where you’re coming from and how you got into homeschooling.
I quit my job six months after my son was born to stay home and raise him. The initial plan was until he started kindergarten and then he went to public school. One of the best of the best, Blue Ribbon, and within eight weeks, we’d had about fifteen incidences. Suddenly, I found myself pulling him out of public school and becoming what we laughingly referred to as an accidental homeschooler. I never intended to do this with my life. I intended to go back to my career. That’s important for people to know that not everyone stumbles into this on purpose. Sometimes, life happens and you alter course for what’s best for your family and your kids.
We’re an accidental homeschooler too. We knew about it and we liked the concept for many reasons. We’re in a great school area. Orange County and South Orange County has some good schools. I did notice right away when my daughter started going into the first grade that she was coming home “dumber.” We saw quickly within weeks that her speed at which she learned things and was able to comprehend had slowed down. She was being held back. She was telling us she was learning things that she was already well aware of and had learned years before. That was the catalyst for us to accelerate the whole decision on whether to homeschool or not.
My son, through math manipulatives and math curriculum called Miquon, was multiplying and dividing before kindergarten. They go back to learning numerology. They’re learning their numbers and how to count and then they’re adding up to 9 or 10 is about how high they go. I agree that there’s a regression that happens for some kids.
For a lot of kids and maybe half of the classroom, there is a regression. The pace of the classes and probably the pace of the average student, sometimes they have to slow it down.
The Common Core was established to the lowest common denominator.
I had a lot of issues with Common Core when it came out.
There was a huge influx into the homeschool community many years ago when Common Core started because of how it was developed without any psychologist involved in the development of it. It wasn’t developmentally correct and it went to the lowest common denominator. There were some bad things about it and then there were some good things where it gave the entire country a common standard to achieve. If kids moved from one region of the country to another, they were doing similar things at that level in the grade.
As Common Core rolled out nationwide, is it the core curriculum that all schools or at least public schools are using?
It rolled out. I’m not sure how many states have opted out of it. There are over ten that have said no. They adopted it initially because their funding was attached to it and then there were problems with it in some states, so they rolled it back and said no.
I always like to start with some basic questions and that is, what is homeschooling? A lot of people don’t have an understanding of what it is. Everybody reading this has heard of homeschooling and has probably an idea of what it might be, but let’s briefly talk about what homeschooling is. The timing of this is pretty interesting too because we’re right in the thick of this whole coronavirus thing going on. Schools around the country and even in other countries, including Canada, have effectively been closed. Kids are at home and some of them have virtual schooling with the school and the teachers and some of them don’t. It’s been thrown onto the parents to guide them along or pick up where things have been left off. Everybody is wondering, “How do I do this?” Let’s start with the most basic things here. What is homeschooling?
If you ask different people that question, you get different answers. In my opinion, it’s not just bringing public school work home and following that same schedule. It’s not schooling at home. It’s customizing your child’s education for what interests them, for what fits it around your family. It’s a way of life more than a curriculum that you bring home. It does have a way of invading every area of your life. Your friends become other homeschoolers. You field trip together. Sometimes we incorporate travel. Family trips are sometimes built around what we’re learning that year in school. In October, we’re supposed to go to Europe because we will be studying world history and world art. I wanted to bring a tactical experience into that learning to make it stronger, more vivid, and help them remember it better.
There’s a form of lifestyle that’s baked into the cake. It’s not just schooling as some people seem to think. The thing with homeschooling too is there’s such a broad spectrum with it. It goes from one end of the spectrum, which is school at home. Essentially, you’re duplicating what you have going on in the public school system to the far end of the other side of that spectrum, which is known as unschooling, which to me is borderline radical. It’s wide open and there’s virtually no structure. It’s such a broad spectrum.
We’ve tried it. My son was a couple of years ahead at one point, so I gave him an opportunity to take six months and try unschooling. In my experience, he played a lot of video games and goofed off most of the time. He came out of it wanting to become a video game developer. He did gain something out of the experience, but it looked like a lot of goofing off to me. I have friends though that have been successful with it. Their kids have gone on to gain graduate degrees and become professionals and very focused. They spent those years focused on what they wanted to become and what they wanted to learn about. Sometimes it looks like pig trails, but all those pig trails are the culmination of their high school come together and then they make a decision about where they want to go for careers and education.
One of the best things about homeschooling is that you don’t have to recreate school at home. In most cases, you shouldn’t recreate school at home. There’s this broad spectrum of ways to educate your children at home and out of the home and in any environment. Why do people choose to homeschool? Different people have different reasons. Why do you think people choose to homeschool?
People choose for a variety of reasons. We’ve been homeschooling for years and in that time, we’ve had a huge immunization crisis in the state of California that’s pushed a huge group of people to homeschool because they don’t want their kids immunized. They want the opportunity to slow back rather than stick to the typical schedule. The new sex education that’s been rolled out in California has also caused another wave of parents to pull their kids out. Before those two political reasons happened, people primarily did it because they wanted to spend more time with their kids. They thought they could teach their kids better than the public school. We had two kids in kindergarten. Grant was only there for eight weeks and in that eight weeks, one kid went on anxiety medicine almost immediately. I then heard later that a second child had as well.
The pressure even in kindergarten to perform in the Orange County School System was so high that kids were already going on anxiety meds in kindergarten. One thing about homeschooling is there’s no anxiety and there’s no pressure. You work at your own pace. One of the things I established early on was the decision that we’re going to work to mastery. There are no grades. You’re going to get an A in everything because if you do the work and it’s not to my satisfaction, it’s not a level work, you’re going to redo it until it is. Not in a harsh way but like, “This needs a little bit more work and this is why. This answer to this math problem isn’t correct. I need you to rework it.” In that way, schooling was a lot gentler and kinder than public school is.
With public school, you’re either being pulled and dragged to keep up with everyone else or you’re being held back to slow down because everyone else has not been able to pick up and grasp the material as quickly as some of the other students. There’s this bell curve.
Grades K-2 are so similar, not maturity-wise but academically. They’re similar that we’ve completed K-2 in almost a year. In a year and a half, we’ve completed with all three grades. My son didn’t skip any grades but because he was able to quickly progress from K-2, that gave us a lot of time to play around with his education and a lot of the educational philosophies that are out there. We figure out what worked for us and what didn’t work for us. Every kid is different and how they learn is different. Every person is different and the public school system can’t allow for that.
That’s one of the things that’s at the core of homeschooling. Every child is different and every child is brilliant. They’re smart. Every kid is a genius but they all learn differently. Their modalities are different. The speed at which they learn is different. The subjects that they excel at are going to be different. Someone might be very skilled in mathematics and struggle with science or the arts or English. The opposite might be true. When you can pace them and let them learn as fast as they can in one subject because it’s easy for them, and then you have to help them in another subject because it happens to be hard for them, you’re able to adapt to their learning speed and style. It’s almost like custom education for the person. It’s almost like getting a custom pair of shoes or a suit tailored for you. It’s built for your body.
If I could go back to your question and answer why people homeschool. I started with the huge exceptions, but the reasons why people homeschool are because they want to spend more time with their kids. Their kids have needs that can’t be met within the public school system. That’s probably the number one reason. You’ll have kids with food allergies, kids that are being bullied, kids that are way ahead or way behind. All of those children are not having their needs met by the public school system. That’s usually why the parents are pulling them out to homeschool them, to give them a different environment.
That’s almost impossible because the more students there are per classroom, the harder it is to cater to any one student in that room.
I heard that Santa Ana has 40 kids per classroom in K-5.
They’re cramming them in.
There’s no parent support because in that part of Orange County, both parents have to work. There are no parents in the classroom. You look at Irvine or some of the other cities in South County, a lot of the moms stay home. There’s a lot of parent support in the classrooms when they’ve gotten bigger. The teacher can break the kids up into smaller groups and parents work with smaller groups. You’re not getting that support in the less affluent areas because parents will have to work.
I want to comment on people reading this that we could talk for hours if not days about homeschooling. It’s because there is so much information and content out there about what homeschooling is. There are different ways to homeschool, what to look for, what to start with, the best practices, although I don’t even think there are best practices because it’s so broad. The myths around homeschooling, the realities, the amount of content and guidance. There are books written on the subject. There are podcasts out there about the subject. There is a ton of information online about homeschooling if you know the right phrases to type into Google or any search engine. We could talk for days about this but we’re not going to do that.
I want people to understand that it’s my goal here to bring you on and maybe another guest on and share some of what we’ve learned and experienced in terms of homeschooling because other people are interested for different reasons. Sometimes, it’s also related to money and finance. I wanted to put that out there. One of the myths that seem to be pretty widespread, and I’m sure people are thinking about this, is if you homeschool your children, they’re not going to be adjusted or well socialized. I believe that in the very beginning. I thought, “If my child is home most or all of the time, she’s not around other kids and she won’t be socialized.” The reality is it’s the opposite of what was true. What do you think about that whole thing about socialization?
In my experience in Orange County, I do stay on some national blogs. I know some people live in tiny towns where this won’t be true. In Southern California, we have such a huge homeschool community, specifically in Orange County. We probably have fifteen campuses that have been started by homeschool moms and with all sorts of teachers teaching classes. Our kids have the opportunity to come together on a campus for one class, all their classes, but that’s up to the family’s education philosophy. We also field trip together. We take trips together. We camp together. We have many opportunities. HSC does 4 or 5 camping trips a year for homeschoolers in beautiful places all around California.
That’s something that a public school is not able to offer because the kids have to be in the classroom 180 days a year. We can go out and go to the beach for the day and call some friends and say, “Let’s go and look at the tide pools and spend the day on the beach.” We call it Marine Biology for the day and physical fitness. It goes back to the lifestyle thing. Our kids are socialized. There were years in our homeschooling experience where we were hardly ever home because we were taking many classes and sports and different things that he was involved with.
I’ve come to learn that there is a lot of freedom and flexibility with it. That’s what trips a lot of people up is because a guy like me that needs some structure, I’m a very analytical and structured person, I need a framework to work within. That exists and it’s out there in more than one version or variation of that. There are many different ways to homeschool, but I felt that there needed to be a lot of structure right from the get-go. What I’ve come to learn is that there’s no wrong way to homeschool. There are a million and a half right ways to do it and there’s no wrong way to do it. You do learn as you go.
You get more confident in your ability to direct your kids’ education, but also you get more confident in their ability to tell you what they need, what they like, what they don’t like, what’s working and what’s not working. We’ve had to adjust his education as we’ve got along based on feedback he’s given me. “I don’t like reading this out of a book. Why can’t I learn it from a video?”
That’s the beautiful thing about homeschooling. You have the feedback from your kid or your kids, you know how to adjust, adapt, speed up, slow down or incorporate more tools and resources or less. You’ve got constant ongoing feedback and you can adjust in real-time, whereas in a school environment you can’t do that. You create the optimal education and learning environment for the person because it’s custom-tailored to them.
Because of the parent-child relationship, you’re already super close and super bonded, your kid is going to be more honest with you than they are with a teacher. If you give them something to do and they don’t like it, they’re going to tell you they don’t like it. Whereas with the teacher, they’re going to do it because the teacher said they had to. We come up with a much more meaningful education. There are some times where I make him do projects that he doesn’t like, but if he says it’s boring, then I do have to stop and think about why am I making him do this? Is it worthwhile? Is there another way we could do this that would be more meaningful or interesting to get to the same end? Not that all work in life is going to be meaningful or interesting, so I have to temper it with that.
Back to the socialization question, another thing I want to add is I have a field trip group. At one point, it was almost 700 families and I’ve decreased it since then. One of the things that I’ve learned through the years is I usually hire a docent when we do tours. They usually have a PhD or at least a Master’s degree in whatever the topic is. It’s interesting to watch the kids even from five years old interacting with subject matter experts on whatever. One of my favorite field trips in Orange County, California is to go to the Harbor Fire Department, the water boats. That’s a fun trip. They let you on the boats and they take you on a tour of the whole boats and explain how it works. They’re fabulous because those are some of the only boats in the world that are that size and that put out that much water. Watching the kids from 5 to 18 interacting with the subject matter experts and being able to dialogue with them because when my son was five, he loved dinosaurs. He could talk to the PhDs at the Natural History Museum about dinosaurs all day long because he had watched documentaries since he was three about dinosaurs.
He talked to their language and the docents are always very fascinated at the homeschool kids at how well they can discourse with them. They’re like, “Your kids are so attentive. They asked such interesting questions.” That’s happened for years when we field trip. I always consistently get feedback from the docents that they enjoyed our group. They’re like, “Please come back again,” because the public school kids are excited to be out of school. It’s like a celebration for them. They’re loud and it’s like a party environment and they’re talking to their friends and stuff. When our kids go on a tour, they want to hear what the docent has to say. They want to learn about whatever. They understand this is part of the school. They’re there to learn and the socialization thing is interesting for homeschoolers because it’s not just age level peers that they’re stuck with all day. They interact with very young to very old all day long from the grocery store to their classes to our tours. They develop a maturity, where they’re able to have conversations with adults from very young. It’s advantageous for our kids because it’s going to do well for them when they go to do their college interviews and job interviews in the future.
I noticed early on that homeschooled kids, especially the younger ones, were very mature and were able to hold what is essentially an adult-level conversation with an adult. There was no child talk. They were talking as if they were peers of a similar age group. It was amazing to see that the kids weren’t appearing or coming across as kids. They were small people and it was an eye-opening thing for me to see when you have 7 and 8-year-old kids talking to 12, 13, 14-year-old kids and they’re all talking as if they were of the same age. It’s amazing. The whole socialization thing is one of the myths that I recognized early on. I was in that boat, but there’s so much that goes on with the homeschooling. They’re involved in many activities with other homeschooled kids out of the house and even with others that are not homeschooled. The socialization thing is an absolute myth and it doesn’t happen.
If I may touch on one other myth, this is not as common, but a lot of people mistakenly think that homeschooling is school at home, where usually the mother has setup an environment where you’re “teaching” from the front of the “classroom.” There is a whiteboard or a chalkboard and there are textbooks. You are providing instruction as if you had an instruction manual and this is what you need to teach and these are the things you need to say. Your child is sitting in a desk listening to you talk as if you’re a professor at the front of the room. It’s not like that at all. Some parts are like that when you get involved. I know it’s different for every parent, but it’s not where you become the teacher and you’re at the front of the room and you’re instructing your children. It’s nowhere near being that formal.
When we first started homeschooling, when I first transitioned them, I’d put them in K-12, which is a public school charter online school. We did that for about eighteen months and we had a once a week where we met with the class in a classroom. Part of that was because my husband wanted to make sure he stayed on grade level. It was a new thing for us. He was unsure how this was going to work, so he wanted to make sure I had a structure. Part of it was because I did it so fast pulling them out of school, I didn’t know what to do and they were going to provide the structure. It helped me feel more secure also. That was very much a school at home where I had to teach everything. There were some video lessons, but I had to sit with him for his instruction time and help him along. I decided, “I could do this on my own.” I had been spending hours every day scouring the internet, reading all the blogs, listening to podcasts and reading books.
After about a year, I figured out I can do this on my own and I become confident enough to step out and take the reins. There’s a lot of education philosophies out there, but I had decided to move to more literature-based curriculum. I found some different resources to use so that it’s shifted to more of us reading together to learn the content. We would sit on the couch and cuddle and read because it was first grade, he was six. That became a much lower stress and comfortable way to educate him. We did math online. We did it together back then and still, but the resources in the last years have changed so much for homeschooling. For brand new homeschoolers, there are resources where you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to teach if you don’t want to and you can teach everything if you want to. It’s up to the comfort level of the parent.
That’s a good segue to the how-to questions that I have. I’ll chunk into the process of it. Let’s start from the beginning here. Someone who’s wanting to start, regardless of whether it’s a preschooler or someone who’s maybe already in fourth grade or wherever they may be. How do they get started? Where would you recommend parents start this journey into homeschooling?
If they’re in an emergency situation and they need to pull their kid from school and start homeschooling right away, my recommendations would be either Time4Learning or Power Homeschool. They both cost about $25 a month. They teach all four core classes plus a couple of electives. They can put their child on that and the child can be independent on those programs. That frees the parent up to start doing some research so that they can figure out their educational philosophy. They can figure out their child’s learning style and their teaching style as a pair of it. There are a few things you need to figure out before you get started. I say that with a caveat that through the years that I’ve been homeschooling, I’ve tried almost every philosophy. I started in a charter and then we moved to literature-based. We did that successfully for probably five years. As he is in middle school, we moved to textbook-based, and then high school, he’s pretty much online for everything.
Once you’ve figured out your philosophy, your child’s learning style and your teaching style, then typically what you should do is look at some curriculum lists and try and find a curriculum that matches those. Cathy Duffy has got an easy, top 100 homeschool curriculums list that you can browse through and it sorted by those elements. That’s an easy way to do it. In high school, I decided to go back to the public school curriculum for science. I use Holt and MacMillan for all of our science, rather than a homeschool curriculum. That was a personal choice for math. He’s also working through some Pre-Common Core math books for the upper level that I get off of Amazon. That was a decision I made because I didn’t want them doing Common Core math, but that’s up to the individual family. Math is my son’s strength, so we typically do 3 to 4 math curriculums in a year on the same topic to make sure he knows geometry. He knows algebra too and because his speed is faster than most kids in math.
Everyone has different strengths. Another thing I’d like to add to is where do you start. If you look for local homeschoolers and homeschooling groups online, whatever city or county you’re in, you will find probably a lot of other homeschool groups that you can associate with, network with, talk to and join. I know a lot of them have Facebook groups. They communicate and share resources, ask and answer questions online from within that Facebook group. It’s not necessarily even a physical get together. There are also a lot of local activities. For example, Angelina, my daughter is involved in a local Girl Scouts group and she’s very active with that. It’s made up of other homeschool moms and kids. It’s great for them to get together and go through these different activities and adventures together, which helps to educate them and helps with their socialization, their interpersonal skills and all that good stuff.
One year, I created a co-op of a group of friends and we did The Science of Shakespeare together. We hired a drama teacher who taught the material. There are 12 or 14 different sciences within Shakespeare. We covered a different one every month. We built themes around that. We hired an art teacher to also teach. We did a Lego League in the afternoons and we field tripped several times a month based on whatever the science was that month. If it was astronomy, we’d go visit the Griffith Observatory and the Columbia Space Center, and things like that.
You mentioned the curriculum several times. Do you need a curriculum? If so, how do you go about choosing a curriculum? You’ve partly answered this question but we might as well bring it up.
You did not necessarily need a curriculum. A lot of homeschoolers read literature, nonfiction and fiction book. They use that as their curriculum. They’ll pick a theme for the month or year and follow it along. Some of my favorite curriculum when Grant was in K-5 was literature-based. There are some good companies out there that offer literature-based curriculum packages that are already made for you. BookShark is one beautiful feat that we used.
You mentioned Cathy Duffy. I did a search years ago looking for curriculums. There are many different curriculums put out by many different people from many different walks of life. It’s from homeschool moms that have put together their own curriculum to organizations or institutions under .org banner to as far as Ron Paul, who was in politics. He’s got his own curriculum, which is K-12 and it also has a lot of great libertarian and financial stuff baked into it. Much of it is free, I think K-6 is free and then it’s a nominal cost for anything above that. There’s no wrong or right curriculum, it’s what resonates well with you and your kids. You can slice and dice. You can take a part of one curriculum and add it to another curriculum and say, “This is what we’re learning this year. It’s going to be this in math, this in English, this in literature, and whatever else.” You build your own curriculum. It’s that simple.
If I had any advice on curriculum, it would be don’t spend $800 on an all in one package in your first year. There’s a lot of inexpensive curriculum out there that are free that’s as good. I spent a lot of money on curriculum in K-2 because I was scared that I wasn’t going to cover everything. That he was going to somehow end up behind and I read. Facebook is your friend. Every curriculum has its own Facebook group and every region that you live in across the country has its own Facebook group. Usually, your Homeschool Association for the state will have its own Facebook group. You should join those and do a lot of reading. That’s what I did. I spent hours on Facebook the first time and I still am on Facebook all the time because our whole community is on there.
I have a question about the curriculum here. Maybe there’s no answer to this question because the answer is it depends, but how do you know if you have enough, too much or too little in the curriculum that you’ve put together? Is that based on how your kid’s capacity or how fast they learn the subject matter? Is it you as an adult determining that this is what they should know or something else?
It’s going to depend. In K-5, I spent a lot of time with What Your First Grader Needs to Know and What Your Second Grader Needs to Know, those books. I’m using them as an outline to make sure that I was hitting everything that would be expected by grade level. California still had state standards back then. It was before Common Core. I would loosely look at the state standards and determine, “Are we ahead? Are we behind? Where do I need to work?” There are diagnostic tests that you can take, especially K-5. I recommend the company called Let’s Go Learn. They have a DORA/DOMA test that costs about $25 to take and we would take it at the beginning of the year, mid-year and at the end of the year. The first was kindergarten to second grade to see how he was tracking with state standards and to make sure I was keeping him on par.
An interesting thing is I paid a lot of money to have his ed psychologists do a test to know what grade level he was on. The interesting thing for me was that the DORA/DOMA results that cost me $25 were exactly the same. The great thing about DORA/DOMA is it tells you where the hole is. If your kid is having a problem with the deep tongue TH like in spelling, it tells you that is the issue that the student is having and that’s why they missed the score on the test. You come back with the list of actual problems and holes in your child’s education and then you can go back and fill those. That’s why I recommend DORA/DOMA because it pinpoints exactly where in math, in reading and grammar what the child is not understanding.
It’s probably becoming clear to people that any one thing that we’ve talked about, you could go pretty deep on. You or I or anyone else for that matter that’s looking into homeschooling. That’s not necessary and that shouldn’t be a cause for fear or cause for people’s eyes to glaze over because you don’t want to get lost in all the minutia. You have to start somewhere and put something together and allow your children or your kids to start learning. You will learn yourself as you go and you will gain more knowledge and experience. This stuff will start to unfold because you’re going to be associating with other homeschool parents. The number of guides and resources available online are almost overwhelming, but you’ll never get to that point because you’re not going to allow yourself to get to that point. It’s important to put a stake in the ground and say, “We’re starting here. This is what we’re going to use.” It could be a curriculum. It could be the books that you read together, whatever it may be. It’s a good place to start and that’s the how. I have a question about inspiration. Is there a need to inspire your kids to learn to love learning? Are there other ways to inspire kids to gain love and appreciation for learning?
It depends on at what age you start homeschooling. If you start immediately or if they never go to school and you continue from doing and playing with them at home as preschoolers into homeschooling, then their natural wonder and desire to learn carries off on. It is never forted. It’s never curtailed. They’re never told, “Let Susie answer this question instead of you.” It’s a natural progression. If you pull your child out and they’ve learned to get in line and be quiet and follow the classroom rules, a lot of the natural curiosity by 3rd or 4th grade has been removed from the child. It’s a process of having to put that back into them. How do you rekindle it? Grant was only in school for eight weeks when we pulled him out. He already had lost some of that a little bit. For me, it was infusing fun back into learning.
That’s how we got into the field trip process of learning. I’m a big proponent of field tripping. When he was young, we would leave the house at least three times a week, sometimes five, because the school only took an hour to an hour and a half in kindergarten to first grade. We didn’t necessarily use textbooks every day. We had some bad experiences happen with the sports team and a homeschool group we were part of. My son got depressed and so in that situation, even after homeschooling for years, I had to go back to that philosophy of how do I infuse fun back into learning and put safe people around him and help reignite them again.
You can make learning fun. One of the problems with school is that as the years go by, it becomes more about memorization and your natural curiosity starts to die early on. You get to a point where you don’t have a lot of curiosity and you’re not as inquisitive or imaginative. One of the most important skills to keep and develop is imagination. If you don’t have curiosity and imagination, you’re killing a lot of your inner being, your personality, the parts of your mind that should be massaged and grown and allow to expand. That’s one of the great benefits of homeschooling. I have a question here from someone who emailed me. I’m not sure if I fully understand the question. I’m going to read it to you and I’m hoping we can both answer it. She says, “What ways could we offer real-life opportunities or involve the kids in what we are doing that brings it down to their level so they feel practically equipped, motivated and inspired to take the tools we have given them and run with it?” I assume she’s meaning tools as in educational tools.
She said incorporating them into what we’re doing. Is she talking about what the family is doing?
I think it’s involving them, regardless of what is being done to provide real-life opportunities and involve the kids with the goal so they feel equipped, motivated and inspired. That probably comes with homeschooling naturally because when they’re involved in the educational process, going out and experiencing the world together, playing games, reading books together, whatever it is, all that stuff is an involvement. If you bring that all together, it naturally equips and motivates them.
One thing that came to mind was we’ve had a lot of anti-homeschool and anti-parent legislation in the last few years in California. There have been a lot of rallies in Sacramento. I took Grant with me to Sacramento twice. He’s been part of the process of going with me and knocking on Representative’s office doors, opening the door, going in and talking to the staff and setting up meetings and sitting down. We’ve done it with a couple of friends and the kids have sat and talked to the Representatives and told them, “This is why you need to vote no on this bill because it impacts me this way.” That the process of involving the kids even in learning about our legislature, they had a front-row seat in how it works and how it doesn’t work. It was a good experience for him. He got to testify in the hearing. That’s something you probably don’t get to do in public school to go and see our Capitol working. We’ve been there so much to the point that he already knows his way around the Capitol. I get lost and he’ll be like, “No, mom, it’s this way.”
This is a show where a lot of people are interested in finance, investing, personal development, creating wealth and passive income. It’s a lot to do with money and investing. Do you or have you involved Grant in financial education, learning about money or investing? If so, what are a few examples of what you’ve done? How are you educating Grant when it comes to money and finance?
My husband and I both have MBAs. We’re both finance professionals. It was something on our list of things that we wanted him to learn young and to incorporate into his life. In grade school, there’s a great curriculum. It’s a Charlotte Mason based curriculum called How To Run A Pet Store. I think one is a sports store, but it was math. It’s basic arithmetic, but it takes them through the whole bookkeeping, ordering inventory, writing your checks and paying your bills. You can’t go negative. You have to stay in the positive. That was a fun thing to do in grade school and middle schoolers can do it too. It’s an arithmetic-based curriculum. You can do it at any age. We chose to do it in grade school once he was strong in arithmetic. In the middle school, we buy Consumer Mathematics workbook off Amazon and worked through it. He’s also a Boy Scout. One of the things they have to do to become an Eagle Scout is to earn the Personal Management Merit Badge. It’s got some good requirements in it, but it doesn’t go quite far enough.
I found a class at Junior Achievement that incorporated the Merit Badge and they had finance professionals come in at three different weekends in San Diego. We drove down and he would spend the whole day with these finance professionals. The third day was a capstone. It was cool. They did an all-day simulator with the iPads and they had to walk around and they had to do there. They got a fake family. They had a career assigned to them and so they would get their salary. They had to walk around and figure out what kind of transportation they were going to own. Were they going to take public transportation, where they get a rent, and were they going to buy a house? They would do their banking and their investing. They taught them how to do all of it on the simulator.
He came out of it and he was like, “Mom, that was so much fun.” He’s like, “Can we do that again?” One of the things he’s done on his own since then, he loved that simulator so much that he started looking for simulator games on his iPad. He’s played fifteen of them. He kept downloading and playing them. What was interesting, after he’d played a couple of them, he came to me and he said, “I already know how to get wealthy.” I said, “You do?” He said, “Yes, you have to own a real estate. You have to own rental property. That’s the only way to get wealthy.”
How old was he?
He was barely thirteen when he did it. I’ve been thinking for several years about the economy in Southern California and how much it costs for rent and to own a house here. As he becomes a young adult, it’s almost impossible to buy in this economy. Unless you have some wealth already established or you get a career that pays a lot of money. Those are your two options if you’re ever going to own in Southern California at this point and/or inherit. My plan had always been for him to graduate high school at fourteen because I figured we were so far ahead that seemed to be about where we would hit. I was like, “What are we going to do with those four extra years?” In the research I did, I found a lot of interesting things. One of them was if you can dual enroll high school so that you’re also getting college credit and do it inexpensively by using ACE credit or CLEP exams or some of the other vehicles there that are available. You can get a Bachelor’s degree for under $10,000.
Once you have that Bachelor’s degree, you have access to your 529 account because you can say, “I’m no longer going to use this for education. I don’t need it.” There are laws that say, “If you don’t need it for education, you can either invest it in a business or buy a house with it.” That’s what I’m hoping to get Grant to is through using some of the more inexpensive school. In California, you can also go to community college free for grades K-12, then get half your degree free and then only pay for your junior and senior year if you want to go to a Cal State or UC. There are some ways to mitigate the cost and then have access to what’s left in your 529 to do more interesting things with like buy rental properties and build passive income.
That’s an interesting plan. You need a little twist in using the system.
We’re also exploring potential business ideas too on things that we could do within the next years. He is moving into college-level classes, he doesn’t have to take a full load at college. When you take a college class, that comes back to your high school diploma as two times the credit amount. One semester is equal to a year. You only have to take 2 to 3 college classes a semester to maintain a full high school transcript load. Honestly, he’s already halfway through high school, so I probably could have him well through his junior year with the credits he has. My son doesn’t even have to take that heavy of a college load to still finish by eighteen, but in the extra time that he has, what are some business ideas that we could pursue? He’s taken two years of shops. He can do woodworking and welding. He was an internationally competitive sailor. He can teach sailing during the summer if he wants to. He could tutor math. There are things even at his age where we could start an LLC for him. He could start earning some money even from home.
There are lots of opportunities there.
In California, we think, “They can’t work until they’re sixteen.” Most places won’t hire until they’re eighteen and they have a diploma. As a homeschooler, you’ve got control of your work permit. You sign it. You’re not reliant on a principal getting permission from someone else to sign a work permit and say, “My kid can work.” That makes homeschooling so attractive is your kid can go and work in Hollywood. They can tutor. You can think outside the box about how we could start an online business.
In that vein, do you have recommendations on how to help develop your kids’ wealth mindset? You’re already doing some of those things by involving them in business and giving them some financial education, but is there something more that can be done to help develop a wealth mindset?
I honestly believe that allowing them to manage their own money at a younger age than eighteen is important. I’m coming from my background were when I got out on my own, I went into debt because no one had sat me down and talked to me about money. We’ve talked to Grant about money his whole life. One of the things we did when he was born is, we opened a checking and a savings account for him and his 529 account. When he got to 10 or 11 years old, I thought that’s great that we did that. All his birthday money and Christmas money and stuff went in there, but he didn’t experience it. I did a lot of research and I found a bank that would let him have a free checking and a free savings account. I took him across the street and we sat down with the banker and he had to open his checking in his own savings account. It was a new branch. It was interesting. The banker spent two hours with him explaining how everything worked. I think she was excited to have a kid come into and she taught him how to use his ATM card. He took him over and showed him how to talk to the tellers and how to make his first deposit. She did that whole process with him.
One of the things in his Boy Scout Merit Badge was we had to pay him an allowance every week and then he had to spend something every week. He had to keep track of it for thirteen weeks. He had this inflow and this outflow. He was learning how to manage a real checking account. The practical experience was very important. I would walk him across the street to the bank or I’ll drive him. I’m making him go in and talk to the teller and make the deposit. When he needed money to pay me back, we would order things on Amazon that he had to order. When he had to buy something every week, he’d go on Amazon and he’d pick a game or something that he wanted or a book and he’d buy it. His debit card got attached to his Amazon account. That’s another thing. He has his own Amazon account. He has his own Audible account because I didn’t want his recommendations mixed with mine. He’s had that since he was born. I started those accounts for him, but now they’re his.
He knows how much he can spend and how much he can’t. He manages that. I wanted to get him a credit card when he turned thirteen, but they’ve changed the consumer laws. He’s not allowed to have one until he’s eighteen. Not even with me on the account, which bummed me out because we are big proponents of charging everything and then paying it off at the end of the month before the interest hits. That we get the advantage of the points or the money back. He’s not allowed to do that until he’s eighteen. I think that kids need to learn how to manage their money while they’re at home and supervised. Debt needs to be explained too, which the credit card law upsets me. I wanted him to have credit so that he can learn how to use it responsibly while at home, so when he gets out at college and he can charge everything, he knows his limits and knows not to do that. He does have a debit card and he never uses it. He’s like a Little Scrooge. He gets his money and he puts it in the bank. The other thing we did, his first checking and savings account were rolled into an investment account, which is under my name. We are starting to teach him how to invest in the stock market too.
I don’t know if you do this, but it’s a little thing with a huge impact. That is to talk about money, finance, investing and anything related to wealth at the dinner table or anytime you’re sitting together at a table as a family. Whether it’s at Starbucks for a coffee or dinner in the evening or lunch or breakfast to have those conversations whenever it’s appropriate. It doesn’t have to be every day, but having them listen in on those conversations, and then at some point, having them involved in those conversations. That goes a long way in educating them and helping them to build a mindset because they’re learning through osmosis. They’re learning these concepts and the terminology from the conversation that’s going on. Do you do much of that?
We do. It’s funny, Power Homeschool has a high school level personal finance class, which he took. He will listen to Pat and I have conversations about money at the dinner table and he will interrupt us and say, “You’re doing that? That’s bad,” and he’ll tell us why. Sometimes he’s right, especially a lot of the personal-finance classes that are out there will teach you not to use debt at all. I’ve already told you our credit or debt philosophy. We’re having a conversation at the dinner table and he jumped in and said, “You shouldn’t do that. You should be paying it off immediately.” There are cons to teaching your kids about money too.
If you’re wrong and they’re correcting you, that’s a con. Take it as a lesson.
It was a good conversation about, “You’re right. In normal circumstances, it would be bad.”
In the worst-case scenarios, it opens up a discussion and a conversation for you to explain what is good and bad, right and wrong, and learn from each other.
He was right. Debt is not something you should be carrying if you can afford to live that way. No one should be carrying debt, but it took him a while. His finance class had not discussed credit cards that come with benefits. We had to have that conversation like, “You’re right but our credit card, we can get all those hotel nights we enjoy for free. That comes back to us from incurring the debt and leaving it on the credit card if we would pay it off every month.”
What resources would you suggest or recommend, online or otherwise, that would be good tools for parents and their kids as far as homeschooling and education? That could include financial education, but whatever you want to recommend or suggest. It can be generic. It doesn’t have to be specific.
My first suggestion would be to get on Facebook and find your local community. Find a field trip group in your area. If you figured out some curriculum that you think would work for your family, then join their Facebook group and read up on it. Do some research, even if you’re in grade school, about how to high school with college so that you’re looking ahead and looking at your state laws and how you can incorporate community college in or CLEP exams and ACE credit. There are a lot of free tools out there, Coursera, edX, Sophia.org, and Khan Academy. All of those are free resources that can help accelerate the high school experience so that your child’s time is freed up and they can think more about their career, their future, and what they want to build. By building something that’s their own, that is going to help them be financially independent and hopefully not doing a fifteen-hour job for life.
Is there a strongly recommended book or a couple of books for parents that want to homeschool?
I didn’t read a lot of books when I started homeschooling. Project-based learning was one that I remember. I used a lot of the What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know, that series of books. Every year they plan out to sketch out a loose schedule of what I wanted to make sure we learned if we hadn’t already learned it. For the most part, I use some blogs. Those blogs were primarily first grade, second-grade blogs when I started. They’re not ones that I’m using anymore. The most important thing to keep in mind when you start homeschooling is that you are going to change something at least every semester. If you sit down and reflect on where you’re at, where you want to go, you’re going to find problems in what you’re using in your schedule and on how you’re doing things.
The most important thing I think as a homeschooler is to be flexible and to recognize that you need to change something and to know that it’s okay. That’s what I wish someone had told me at the very beginning, that it’s okay to change things. If you try it and it doesn’t work for you and your family, that’s okay. Tweak it to something new and keep trying until you find a rhythm. It took us probably 2 or 3 years to get into a pattern where I felt comfortable and stable. Even in years of homeschooling, I still tweak things, but I’m comfortable with it. Within a couple of weeks, I can go, “That’s not working. Let’s do something different here.”
The flexibility is one of the advantages of homeschooling. You can experiment, adapt and improve as you go. Sherry, this has been great. I know there’s so much we didn’t talk about but this is a great overview and we’ve covered a lot of different areas and topics. Is there anything else that you’d like to share, something maybe I didn’t ask you that you wanted to make sure you mentioned?
We talked about it previously but briefly, another great thing that you can do with homeschooling is you can have a capstone project for the year. I have a friend who every year has made her daughter write a book since 3rd or 4th grade. That year, they were learning about mythology. She made these little toothpick marshmallow constellations and they took pictures of them. They told me the Roman and Greek gods that are tied to it. She read a little book and it’s got colorful pictures in it. They’ve done that every year. She’s a ninth-grader. They’ve also done poetry workshops to go along with it so that she can do book signings and get other people to see her books and stuff. There’s a lot of creativity you can put into homeschooling that can help your child in the future.
The girl that does that, she’s very poised now because she’s used to being in front of people. She’s used to leading these poetry workshops and talking about herself and her book. Her mom was very intentional in how she developed that educational process for her daughter. She thought about the future, “Where do I want her to be? What do I want her to accomplish? How do I make her stand out on a college application?” Even in third grade, thinking ahead like that. I think you’ve got a lot of opportunity for creativity and thinking about your kid specifically. What are their strengths? What can we do with those strengths? How can we monetize it? How can we create opportunities for them with it? That is what makes homeschooling from being schooled into a world-class education.
You can make your child or children so much more of who they are and help them become the person that they want to be and were meant to be and help them grow and flourish. You can help them get there much faster than they would have to go through more traditional school means of education. It’s a great thing.
We’ve heard repeatedly from colleges that our kids come in more poised, more curious and more interested in the process. I think that’s because we structure their education for them.
I think that says a lot. Sherry, I want to thank you for taking all this time to share your experience, comments, feedback and knowledge with us about homeschooling and how we could use it to help educate our kids and give them a success mindset, a wealth mindset, and be able to be such a powerful individual in society. They can come out much further ahead than a lot of people do when they go to a traditional school and public school. I want to thank you for your time. It’s been great.
Thank you for having me.
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I hope this episode gave you a good introduction, some new perspective and answered some of your questions. There is a lot of good free information out there both online and off, so I encourage you to look into it more. To help you get started, here are some few resources that we’ve used and some others that are worth checking out. This is by no means an exhaustive complete or thorough list. This is some of the stuff that I know of, some of the stuff that we’ve used, and some of the stuff that I have looked into and maybe not have used or at least not used yet. There are a lot of resources out there both online and off. Let me go through this list that I wrote down here for myself to pass on to you.
As far as online resources, one great website that is very thorough, everything from A through Z is TheHomeschoolMom.com. There you’re going to find everything from homeschooling 101 to resources, to reviews, to curriculums, to non-curriculums and anything and everything in between. There are other websites like this one out there, but I happened to like this one because it is well organized and very thorough. One of the websites that we used early on with my daughter is Time4Learning.com. It is a little more cartoonish in a way, very colorful and enjoyable. It’s better for children, especially in the early elementary grade levels. There’s still a lot of information, courses and lessons on there that we never used, but we started there. That was first grade and I don’t remember when we stopped using it because we ultimately migrated to other tools and more offline books.
A lot of these books came from Amazon, but there are also booksellers online that sell books and resources, specifically for homeschoolers. From Time4Learning, we migrated to Khan Academy. It was created by Sal Khan. An interesting backstory there and I suggest you listen to his story on YouTube about how Khan Academy was started. It was for his niece and he was doing videos for her and people were starting to watch the videos and requesting more and that’s how Khan Academy was born. Ultimately, it’s grown to this behemoth of a website with tons and tons of content. It’s all great and it’s free. It was co-funded by Bill Gates. He got to find out about it and loved it so much that he thought he should help fund that as an informational educational tool. If I’m not mistaken, he put $40 million into it. KhanAcademy.com is a great educational aid.
PowerHomeschool.org is another great website, full of information, resources, lessons and curriculums that you can follow if you want that kind of structure. Another great website is Alison.com. Those are some great resources that can help in your child’s education, even if they’re a teen or a young adult because a lot of this stuff goes right through twelfth grade. On the financial side, there are some financial resources on all of those websites from personal finance to basic economics. They don’t go into a lot of great depth, but it’s a great start. There are three websites that I like from an economic and financial perspective. One company or organization, they’re called the Council for Economic Education. They have two websites and they have a ton of content. They post it on YouTube, but they also have it on their websites, which is CouncilfForEconEd.org. That is short for Economic Education.
They also have a sister website that shares some of the content called EconEdLink.org. That is short for Economic Education Link. Those two sites are for the Council for Economic Education. They produce well-polished and great short videos that cover everything from monetary policy to currency to supply and demand. They’re great. Another website that has videos for a small fee is Udemy.com. Many of you probably heard of this website. There is free content there as well, but a lot of the videos and lessons are nominal in cost, anywhere from $10 and up. There’s another website that I’m looking into more. It’s Coursera.com. It is another great resource. There are many others, but these are excellent starting points. This can make a significant portion of your overall content and curriculum, but you do need to supplement this with some other stuff. Those are online resources.
Books are another category of resources that I find to be incredibly broad, deep and rich. From a financial perspective and to help develop a children’s wealth and abundance mindset, what I suggest you do as a parent or parents, ideally both spouses, read the book Rich Dad’s Rich Kid Smart Kid. This is different than Rich Dad Poor Dad. The reason I suggest you to read this is because it is going to create the mindset preparation and overall framework for you as a parent to talk to and educate your children about financial education. If you’re not sure where to start or you’re not sure what to do, I suggest and recommend my friend Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad’s Rich Kid Smart Kid as the starting point. From there, read Rich Dad Poor Dad if you haven’t already. If you have, I suggest you reread it. There is a new updated/expanded version of the book that is out. If you have an old version of that book, you may want to invest the $10 or whatever it is for the new version of the book, the expanded and updated. When you go to Amazon, make sure it’s got that label or seal on the book.
Rich Dad Poor Dad is also a book that you can read to your children or with them. You can have them read a chapter by chapter and then discuss it together. You can also have them read a chapter at a time, and then have them tell you what they read and what they understood from that chapter or you can have them write a “book report.” You could do it on a chapter by chapter basis or you can have them finish the book and then write a book review and summarize the book back to you. That is a great way for them to internalize and understand the content. Rich Dad Poor Dad, I find it to be a cornerstone book for not only your education but also theirs. It helps you with your mindset. It also gives you some very foundational principles. Along with books are audiobooks and there are hundreds of books available online. I use Audible. It has virtually every book that you would want available in audio form. If you want to consume and digest books in the form of audio, then go for it.
I like audiobooks because it’s convenient, but when it comes to numbers, data, detail, and analysis, I comprehend far better with a paper book than I do with an audiobook. Magazines and newspapers, maybe pull out the Wall Street Journal from time to time. Pull out a magazine such as Inc., Forbes or Fortune and thumb through it with your children or your kids. Their age is going to determine what you show them and how deep you go into it. Amazon to me, is your best friend. There are millions of books on Amazon and you can look up anything about any topic for any age and you can preview it online. You can order it and you can go through it together or you can make it part of your curriculum and say, “These are the books you’re going to read this month or this week.” That becomes part of your homeschooling. Between the online resources and the books, you’ve pretty much got everything covered.
I’m going to take this further and talk about a couple of other categories, games. There are lots of toys and games out there, depending on your children’s age. The big ones for me early on and believe it or not, my daughter loved the Monopoly. She still loves playing Monopoly to this day. I’m not exactly sure why, but she happens to like the competitiveness of it. We did play Cashflow for Kids early on, which is a very watered down basic way to introduce children to income and expenses, assets and liabilities. That’s Cashflow for Kids. The real game is Cashflow 101. That’s the original board game of Cashflow and that is a fantastic education tool because it’s fun. You’re engaged and it’s participatory. I suggest Cashflow 101. If you want to take it one step further, there’s Cashflow 201, which gets into the paper assets of investing, as opposed to the hard assets of investing. You can go through this progression of playing games and toys that are related to the stock market, investing or money in any way. You can find it, but then you can play Cashflow for Kids, migrate to Cashflow 101 and then, if you want to go to Cashflow 201.
Video and TV are also good tools. I don’t mean watching reruns of the Simpsons. I’m talking about using your television to play documentaries on history, economics and whatever it may be. There are a lot of documentaries out there, whether it’s on Netflix or the History Channel, The Learning Channel, Discovery Channel or National Geographic. These are all outstanding channels or networks available to provide educational content. There are tons of it out there. Two of my favorite shows on regular television are Shark Tank and The Profit. I think they go far beyond being a reality show in the sense that they are educational and there is always something to be learned from those two weekly shows on CNBC. Shark Tank’s been running for many years and it is entertaining to watch, but you always walk away having learned something from a business/entrepreneurial perspective. Anybody of any age can learn from watching Shark Tank and The Profit. There are miscellaneous movies and videos.
Don’t discount YouTube. It has a ton of great content, but you have to be careful. There are probably two tons of terrible useless garbage on YouTube versus every ton of great educational content. If you spend the time to find the channels on YouTube that produce good content, then you will find all kinds of resources that you can share and learn from, not just for yourself but for your kids. The Council for Economic Education that I talked about is an example of a channel on YouTube that has that stuff. Another channel on YouTube that I thoroughly enjoy and I think they do an outstanding job on is PragerU. You could probably do a search on YouTube for Prager University and it will be one of the first ones that pop up. That is also another great resource and you can chunk it by year, by month or however you want to do it.
There are hands-on items like MEL Science. It has a lot of kits that you subscribe to. They ship 1 or 2 every month, however many you want. These are hands-on projects where you get to roll up your sleeves and do stuff, whether it’s by your kids, by themselves or you do it with them. These are all science experiments and things where it’s like being in a lab. You have all the different experiments that you could do in the house or outside the house depending on what it is. They’re like project kits. Other companies do this too. I don’t remember who they are, but MEL science.
There are other project kits that you can buy at a hobby store or on Amazon that involve lenses, prisms, magnetism, creating a little electrical generator or whatever it may be. You pick and choose based on your kid’s age. Last but not the least, and this is a big category, there are many different learning centers that you can go to depending on where you live and the size of the city or county. You can get museum memberships. There are museums all over the country. You can visit a museum and make it an educational outing. Sometimes, you’ll go more than one day because the museums are so big or you end up getting a membership. They change the exhibits and what they have going on in the museum. You might go there multiple times throughout the year and make that like a field trip.
You can also plan your own field trips to wherever that maybe. It may be a musical or a play like what I’m involved in with these Broadway productions, which you probably have seen on the website or in our weekly newsletter. If you’re curious about that or you have an interest in participating in those with me, reach out to me and let me know. We have seven Broadway musicals on the slate that are coming up and coming out. We try to go to plays and musicals here in Southern California at various venues. My wife coordinates group packages at discounted prices for the homeschool groups that she’s involved in. We get discounted tickets at pretty good seats at different times during the month or week at all kinds of plays. This is another field trip type of outing. This is the arts. Call it whatever you want, it’s another part of that overall education.
There are Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, which are worth doing for many reasons. It’s not just the socialization aspect of it, but the lessons learned, the responsibility and the accountability that comes along with the events that the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts do. The badges they earn. It’s a lot of fun. It’s engaging and participatory. I think it’s a good thing. There’s probably a lot more that I haven’t covered, but you can see that there are many resources and things to do and access to information. There’s no reason why you can’t homeschool or supplement your existing schooling with the resources that are out there to help build a better education for your children and especially the financial education. That is it for this long episode. I hope it was informative and helpful. If it was great, let me know. If you have additional questions, maybe shoot them over to me. That was it. I hope I’ve helped some of you out with that. I appreciate you tuning in and if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review. I love that you do that. I do read them all, so I appreciate that. Thank you and we will see you on our next episode.
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