Ryan just spent $204.44. He didn’t do it lightly. That’s because he knows just how long it took him to earn that money. His one-day-a-week paper route earns him $11/week. That’s 19 weeks of folding and throwing papers. But he also gets $10/week in allowance. Enough to help him get some of the things he wants, but not everything. (That explains the paper route.) With the allowance, his total time was reduced in half. To a 15-year old, that’s still…
I’ve been doing a little work with a group of foster kids ages 17-19. One of my goals has been to get them to see that their daily actions can influence their future. So at one of our last group meetings we talked about goal setting. I had them write down their goals for one-, five-, ten-, and twently-years. That begs the question…what are you doing right now to reach those goals? But this most recent meeting was about their…
I was in Ryan’s room this morning looking for his graphing calculator (that’s my next blog entry!), when I discovered a piece of paper that, apparently Ryan needs to fill out. It was titled, Whitney High Track and Field Goal Sheet. Very cool. His track coaches are making the athletes think about and write down their goals for the season. The first goal was pre-determined by the coaches: to have fun. Nice. Then, athletes need to write their individual goals and…
I hung out in a second grade classroom last week to talk about saving money and then have the students make their own Money Jar. It was a fun lesson and the Money Jars turned out unbelievable. Kids and their creativity never ceases to amaze me. While we were discussing money issues, I asked the students how they got money. Of course, the usual answers came up…allowance, chores, birthday money. Then one little guy raised his hand and volunteered, “You have to spend…
For someone who is very interested in his money, mostly because he needs it to fill up his car with gas, Nathan does a pretty bad job of keeping his cash organized. He’s got some in his bathroom drawer, some on the floor of his room, some in his backpack, and some spilling out of the cup holder in his car. And who knows where else. So he decided the other day to collect it all and see how much…