education pod – Pod of One

Homeschooling on a Budget

We are not especially wealthy, especially since I lost my job to COVID-19. We live on a budget, now more than ever. When school closed and I became a stay-at-home dad/home school teacher/tutor/disciplinarian, things changed rather dramatically, as they did for everyone.

My daughter needed me to help her, and I wanted to. We started daily lesson plans, some of which I have already described on here, and others are yet to come. What made this easier is that I’d been accidentally planning for this for the past year without even knowing it.

I’ve gotten very good at finding bargains over the years, and I buy for the future. I call it taking care of “future us”. I thought for a different kind of post today, I would share how I do all of this on a budget.

Clearance Sales are Key

I always search the clearance sales at Target, Walmart and other stores. Both Target and Walmart have a decent sales section, but sometimes clearance is mixed in with the regular items. It helps to have the store’s app to scan items when you see that they are on clearance. Sometimes you find that they’re even cheaper than marked! Plus, it’s easier than finding one of the store scanners and using it over and over.

Both stores have a massive clearance sale around this time of year (August). Walmart recently put almost their whole toy and craft inventory at 70% off. Last week I got a shopping cart full of STEM projects, craft items and more for less than $100 and they will last us quite a long time.

I follow a few Facebook pages that share clearance sales at Walmart and Target. They will send out posts and shoppers share deals and when things are on sale.

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Your Local Dollar Store

The dollar store is an especially great place to pick up crafting supplies. Our good local one is Dollar Tree. I highly recommend checking their aisles carefully, especially the craft aisle. Ours recently added a great wood craft section and we even got some 3-D unicorns and dinosaurs we could paint. They have rainbow popsicle sticks, foam paper, coloring books, and even have a decent supply of workbooks for elementary school-aged students.

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Yard Sales and Flea Markets

COVID-19 has basically put a stop to garage sales right now, but I’ve been going to them for years and they are an easy way to add things to your home school pod. Simple items like sets of blocks and other building toys can be $1 or so, and even brand new crafting sets, STEM sets and more can be $1-3. Totally worth it, but they are hit or miss, so it can be a bit of a commitment.

I highly recommend hitting community yard sales. These usually have 10-20 houses selling items, and while you will have a few homes where there’s nothing useful, you’ll find others where you get a couple hundred dollars worth of materials, kits and games for $20.

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Facebook Marketplace

This is another good place to keep an eye out. Many people sell items here yard-sale style, but they will usually be a little bit more. I’ve gotten great deals on brand new items and craft supplies on Marketplace. Always check the toy section on here for great crafting and STEM kits.

Buy Nothing

Buy Nothing groups on Facebook are pretty amazing. Join the one in your local community and you can gift items you no longer want to someone in your neighborhood. They are sectioned off by town, so you know everyone who posts is fairly close to you. My town is pretty small, so I’ve never driven more then six or seven minutes to pick something up.

People post everything from household goods to toys and crafts, and I’ve gotten our little pod lots of great little additions thanks to it. Find your local Buy Nothing if you want to join through Facebook.

Amazon

Amazon has amazing clearance sales sometimes, but the problem is finding out about them. There are many Facebook groups that help watch for sales, similar to the ones I mentioned for Walmart and Target. Deals & Steals is a good one that focuses on children a bit more than most. There’s also this glitches group and a deals group you may want to follow. They post cheap deals on Amazon, and this was the major way we bought items that kept the whole family busy during the quarantine part of the virus.

So there you have it. This is how I’ve survived the pandemic with a wealth of DIY kits, crafting supplies, STEM toys and more. I’ve been doing this for a few years, and I’m glad to share my experiences.

Do you know another way to bargain your way into a cheaper home school? I’d love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments.

Saving Worms

Ever notice how there are worms slithering around on sidewalks after a rainy day?

Amelia noticed. She spotted them on one of our many really hot days and asked what would happen to them.

“Daddy, what happens to them in the sun?”

“They dry up and die.”

“That’s sad. Let’s save them!”

So we decided to spend the morning rescuing the worms. And let’s face it, worms are great for our garden, so it was win-win. Or if you’re a fan of The Office, win-win-win.

We got a small beach toy and started picking the worms up and placing them inside. Amelia decided she didn’t want to touch them, so she used a very colorful zip tie to put them in. I used my hands.

And then we freed them. We talked about how worms make the soil better, and since I didn’t know much about the science behind it, decided to watch this video:

I love when her questions lead me to new knowledge. Because let’s face it, our kids are going to ask a lot of questions that we do not know the answers to. And on this particular day, I realized that a lot of good lessons for our pod of one could come from her questions.

We also HAD to watch (for the hundredth time) the Coyote Peterson episode where he searches for bloodworms. It really is one of our favorites:

This was something Amelia brought up to me. She wanted to know if the worms on our porch would bite like the do in the video, and I quickly told her no.

She taught me something that day. Sometimes, it’s nice to let her take control of a morning and see what happens. Her wish to save these worms, and her question, brought us both a bit more knowledge. Nothing wrong with that, right?

If you’re looking for a lesson with a little more structure, Growing Minds, Farm to School has some great ideas for lessons and a few books to read.

Ant Farming

One of the more exciting lessons I’ve done lately for my pod of one was an ant farm. I had picked one up on clearance at Tuesday Morning just before the pandemic started. I highly recommend stopping at one of these stores from time to time if you are on a budget. Their prices are pretty good and they often have clearance sections full of learning toys and STEM kits.

The only problem was that I didn’t notice it didn’t include a certificate for the ants, so I had to find them myself. After quite a bit of research, I ended up using a company called Ants Alive because their prices were the best at $4.99USD and free shipping.

We watched a YouTube video on ant colonies, and even watched the Coyote Peterson Ant Bite video. Coyote is a favorite in our house! If you haven’t checked him out, you should.

So I told her about the ants a few weeks after ordering them, which was a mistake. Every day she wanted to check the mail. When they finally came, we followed the directions and put them in the fridge for a bit. This slows them down enough to drop them into the ant farm without worrying about losing some.

This one was a huge hit with Amelia. She checked on them every hour or so to see the tunnels change. It’s pretty amazing how quickly the create their intricate tunnel system.

This farm has a few tubes for them to run around in, and pods for food and water with safety lids to they don’t escape.

We tested different foods and had a lot of fun.

She still checks on them in the morning, although we have a few less at this point.

Kid’s Yoga on Youtube

One day, Amelia noticed my wife’s yoga mat sitting out and asked if we could do some yoga. I figured there had to be some for kids on Youtube, so we did a quick search.

Wow. There are A LOT of yoga videos aimed at children.

I never thought I would be sitting on our carpet doing children’s yoga. But here we are…and my daughter loves it.

Everyone is looking for new ways to keep their kids busy, and come Fall might be looking for ways to fulfill that gym requirement, especially on rainy days when they can’t play outside. Whatever your child’s age or grade, when school is open they get some form of exercise. Now that WE are the teachers, physical activity can be overlooked.

According to the CDC, “Regular physical activity can help children and adolescents improve cardiorespiratory fitness, build strong bones and muscles, reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, and reduce the risk of developing health conditions.”

Marlynn Wei, MD, JD of Harvard Health Blog agrees. “Yoga and mindfulness offer psychological benefits for children as well. A growing body of research has already shown that yoga can improve focus, memory, self-esteem, academic performance, and classroom behavior, and can even reduce anxiety and stress in children.”

Those are some great reasons to make sure our kids are exercising daily, especially in the days of Switches, iPads and online learning. But another key focus in our current situation is anxiety and depression. We can’t always tell when our children are feeling these things, so daily exercise is a good idea.

That’s where children’s yoga comes in. There are plenty of instructors and youtubers creating yoga content just for children. And they are all as simple as heading to YouTube.

As I went through the choices, Amelia yelled “Cosmic Kids Yoga!” After a quick Q & A session it turns out she had been doing it in Pre-K all along. So I started on and she sat right down into a meditation pose.

After a moment, she asked me for oranges. Apparently, in school they always had fruit while doing yoga, and I wasn’t going to argue against healthy eating. So I left the room to slice some oranges for her, and when I came back, she was totally into the lesson.

This particular yoga instructor, Jaime, does a great job reaching children. Each episode has a theme, such as Frozen, Trolls, Minecraft and Spider-man. Then there are other topics, such as the episode “What is Mindfulness and How to do it.”

The Cosmic Kids Yoga website even offers lesson plans and handouts for sale, and a blog where they share ideas and advice. There definitely other channels of yoga for kids, but this is our go-to channel. The video length and themes seem perfect to us.

One of the more recent blog posts is about dealing with anxiety in children during the pandemic. We watched this one together, and then had a chat about how she was feeling about all of these changes in our life.

These days, I have added yoga to our regular weekly lessons, and sometimes she even requests it. Even in the evening she will ask my wife if they can do it.

The beauty of yoga is that it can be a solitary or group event if you have multiple children or a pod.

It’s helping. My daughter is much more calm and relaxed than she was a few weeks ago, and it gives me a chance to get some work done while she poses, stretches and meditates. As long as I remember to bring her those orange slices.