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- How to type
- How to look up words in the dictionary
- Not to text while visiting or having dinner
- Basic building skills
- Basic repair skills (using a screwdriver, wrench, hammer, etc.)
- How to garden (even if inside)
- How to double a recipe (or half it)
- To pick up after themselves; to never expect someone else to do it
- To give a simple hair cut
- To cook from scratch (breads, desserts, soups)
- To identify edible plants
- Name and location of the continents
- To sew a basic stitch on a machine
- How to listen, answer and ask questions–the art of conversation.
- How to work for pay
- To send thank-you notes
- To help clean up from dinner (at home or visiting)
- To keep a budget
- To save money
- To pay for things they want (to learn the value of money)
- How to make homemade household cleaners
- How to check the engine oil
- How to read a map
- Basic first aid and CPR
- Boys: to offer their chair to ladies and elderly, and all to honor others
These are random, and there are so many more. What would you add to the list?
Be sure to visit my dear friend, Kathy’s, website, TeachingGoodThings.com She has a passion for helping families teach practical life skills and she does a fantastic job!
14 comments
This list could be endless, now couldn’t it? 😉 Here’s a few additions that come to mind…
How to change a diaper.
How to unclog a toilet. (how to use a plunger)
How to clean the kitchen.
How to do laundry.
How to plan a menu/ how to make a grocery list.
How to load, care for and fire a gun.
How to start a fire.
Last spring we challenged our teens to buy — and cook!– themselves a week’s worth of groceries/meals for $20. It ended up being an absolutely fascinating experiment. You can read about it here: http://www.owlhaven.net/2012/02/01/preparing-teens-for-life/
This school year my husband and I are planning to let them each set up their own ‘practice’ budget with a minimum-wage income, rent prices they see advertised in the paper, typical car expenses, etc, so that they can get an idea of how quickly money goes. Hubby is even scheming a ‘disaster’ jar, so we can talk about unexpected expenses. We are also encouraging them to save at least 3/4 of their (real life) income now during their teen years so that they’ll be able to afford a security deposit, a paid-for vehicle, maybe even a down payment on a house as young adults.
Also along those lines, I often turn on Dave Ramsey while we’re cooking dinner together so we can be appalled together 🙂 over the massive amounts of student loans, consumer loans, and car debt that folks routinely accumulate these days– and then struggle to escape from! We hope this type of feedback will help them be wiser with their money than we were in our own young adulthood!
Love your list!
Mary, momma to 10, ages 7-24
Mary,
Love. it.! You are wise, wise parents. I may have to copy the grocery/budget idea…so brilliant.
I love what you are doing! Our children are quite young still but we know that we will do what we can to make sure they have a good theoretical and practical foundation to stand on (financially and otherwise) when the day to send them off on their own comes. I will file your wisdom away for the not-to-distant future.
What fantastic ideas! I’m definitely going to ‘steal’ the budget one 🙂
I second the personal finance suggestion. And I would include grocery budgeting as its own item. I would also add converting between metric and imperial to the list (measurements, temperatures, weights, and volumes).
I do have a question for you, though, regarding the “how to cook” item. Presumably, all your children will eventually live as adults, at least for a while, in a household significantly smaller than the one in which they were raised. How do you teach them to cook for less than a crowd? I don’t just mean halving recipes. I know that when I go to the grocery store, and I look at my cart, I can eyeball whether I had too much food on my shopping list or too little. I know how long a chicken will last my little family. How do you prepare them for a day when the planning they are used to participating in will be two or three times too much for their household?
I ask because I know it’s taken some adjustment for me to think about shopping for three or four versus shopping for two, and I know that my stepmother never learned how to think about shopping/cooking for fewer than her parents’ family of nine. It seems pretty clear to me that this element of education can easily be overlooked, so I’m looking for advice on how not to overlook it with my own children.
boys: open the door for a lady or elderly person
safely entertain toddlers and babies
my husband added, change a tire and brand cattle, that last one may be more specific to our ranch family 😉
I would add learning how to read music well enough that one can sing with joy and confidence when new music is sung at church by the congregation. It’s a shame when only a handful of people scattered among the congregation can sing vibrantly on the unfamiliar hymns/songs. There’s such joy in worship when people are singing together with enthusiasm like they do with the familiar songs! But it’s nice to have some variety in music, so besides the old familiar standards, it’s great to have some newer music, too, and to be able to sing it well right from the first verse!
I would add:
*Understanding how the U.S. government, and your state and local governments work (although homeschooling families probably cover this)
*How to write a resume
*Learn a foreign language — Spanish would be useful in most parts of the U.S. and very important in others
*In addition to checking a car’s engine oil, check the air in the tires and know how to add air, and check the brake and transmission fluid levels
*Only applies while you have children at home, but how we answer the phone and take messages in our home
*How to find credible information on the Internet
Sue,
Those are good ones. I have a thought/question I’d love others’ opinion on regarding foreign language. I think learning some basic foreign language is very helpful with better understanding our own language. However, as someone who took two years of French in high school and two years of Spanish in college, I can attest that unless you have ample opportunities to practice your language (being in an environment where only that language is spoken) you will likely not be fluent (or in my case, speak hardly at all) in that language. I have questioned whether or not the time I spent in these classes was worth what I received. Wondering what others’ thought are on that…
Kelly,
I see your point about learning a foreign language. I had four years of French in high school and I remember some phrases and can read French slowly with a French dictionary at my side (didn’t take more in college because it wouldn’t count toward my major).
I was thinking of parts of the country where there are a considerable number of Hispanic people in the area for learning Spanish, for example. If we moved to Las Cruces, NM, where my parents retired, it definitely would be an advantage to almost any type of job/career. It would even help with a home-based business to have English and Spanish versions of your website and if you took orders over the phone and some of your customers spoke Spanish much better than English.
Like you, I’ll also be interested in seeing what others think about this.
Regarding foreign languages: I think you’re right, Kelly, that being in an environment where only the language you’re learning is spoken is the best (and maybe the only way in most cases) to become fluent.
I can’t speak from personal experience, having had no foreign language in high school and only a limited amount in college (less than one year), and no opportunity to practice the language outside of class. However, I have an observation from my niece’s experience that may be relevant to this discussion.
My niece was adopted from India right around her 13th birthday. She had studied English in the orphanage for one year immediately prior to coming to the U.S. Not only were her expressive language skills very limited, as you can imagine, but so were her receptive language skills; she looked very confused for some time during conversations at family gatherings.
Yet by a year or so after she had been adopted, she had made incredible progress in not only comprehension of the language, but in ability to converse quite well with others. It really wasn’t too much after that that one could even tell she hadn’t known English for most of her life. Clearly, that first year here, immersed in the English language, did much more to develop and fine-tune her skills more rapidly and efficiently than the year she studied it while still living among speakers of her first language.
I do think immersion is the key to greater understanding and fluency.
I am so grateful for my mother teaching me many of those skills. Many times I hated having to learn them for I would have much rather been reading a book. However, I have since come back to her many times saying, “Thank you. You were right Mom.”
I would add…how to canoe just for fun!!!