Nathan and his friend, Jayson, were making themselves a snack yesterday afternoon. We started chatting about the math test that Nathan had studied for the night before. He’s taking pre-calculus and has been having a little difficulty making connections between some of the concepts. This was a big test for him and he was describing some of the problems. That’s when Jayson made a comment about how he finally turned his grades around because he found a purpose. Normally, I would have…
Very cool. I’ve actually wanted to know the answer to this for a log time…on a bigger scale than the students I work with. And I happened upon it today. US Bank surveyed 1500 (that’s a lot!) kids ages 5 – 12 to find out what they were saving for. Here’s what they discovered: 30% college 15% car 10% pet 9% trip 8% video game 7% helping others/animals 6% iphone 5% laptop 4% musical instrument 3% cell phone 3% other I…
So that was fun. I got to hang out with kindergartners and first graders this morning. With Ryan’s former K/1 teacher. It was like old times when I used to go in twice a week and teach math. Only this time, I was the student. That’s because I wanted to find out what 5- and 6-year olds know about money. I told them that I wanted to learn from them today. They thought that was pretty cool and sat up…
I had the pleasure of a phone conversation with my 5-year old niece, Olivia, the other night. We were chatting about her first weeks in Kindergarten. Apparently, Ian had brought in a pretty nifty coin collection because she talked about it for about a minute, which, if you know anything about five-year-olds, is a pretty long time for any one topic! So that led to a discussion (albeit, short) on money. I asked her what she knew about money. “You buy stuff…
One of the hardest things for me to do as a parent is to deliberately allow my kids to fail. It’s so hard that sometimes I need to walk out of the room so I don’t end up intervening and bailing them out. Of course, I would never, ever allow my kids to fail if it puts them in any sort of danger. That’s just a no-brainer. But making mistakes is a part of life and, if viewed from the perspective…