If you landed here from a search engine and want to know about 20 March 2008 school closings/reopenings please check the following posts:

After Friday’s school closings many parents will be wondering about whether they should send their children to school tomorrow morning. Here is the school closing news, as of 23:00 on Sunday night.

CLOSED 17 MARCH 2008

All schools in the Commission Scolaire de Montréal

Le Centre Performance Plus and la Polyvalente Lavigne in St-Jerome

All four campuses of the Socrates Schools

Day classes at St. Pius the 10th Culinary School and Adult Centre in Ahuntsic
(evening classes will be held as usual, as will day classes in the adjacent Paul the Sixth High School)

OPEN 17 MARCH 2008

All schools in the Commission Scolaire des Affluents, English Montreal School Board, Lester B Pearson School Board, Commission Scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys, Commission Scolaire de la Pointe-de-l’Ile, Commission Scolaire de la Rivière-du-Nord (with 2 exceptions noted above,) Collège Jean de Brébeuf

Please see this post for more details, and stay tuned to your regular news channel for updates

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

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A short time ago Dojogirl was asking if we could give her an assignment that involves figuring out the cost of living. We had been talking about teaching her to make a budget for the grocery order, and perhaps to show her how to go about paying the utility bills. Then jokingly, when she wanted to buy bottle liners to play Mommy with her dolls, we said we should get her to calculate the cost of having a baby. (This was an exercise given to some local high school kids when Dojogirl was just a baby. They were given a list of the supplies needed - diapers, wipes, thermometers, bottles, etc. - and I found a couple of them wandering in the baby department at WalMart jotting down prices on their assignment sheet. They were less than pleased at the time. Dojogirl, on the other hand, loved the idea!)

I’ve been thinking that it might not be a bad idea to extend this assignment to learning about the cost of financing a home. We had earlier considered teaching the girls about looking for an apartment, but ultimately it’s more cost effective to buy a home. I found a great site where the girls can learn a little something about things like mortgage rates in different US states. They can use the site in conjunction with real estate listings, find a house they want to “buy” and then figure out what their monthly costs would be using the on-site mortgage calculator.

Another feature I really liked on this site was that they can select any state in the drop-down menu, and if they scroll down below the listings for the brokers, there are housing statistics that show things like the total number of homes in the state, how many are rural vs. urban, and how many are owned vs. occupied by tenants. You can also see the number of homes for sale or rent. Go further and select a city, and you get the figures just for that city. The table allows you to compare the city, state & national figures. This is a good opportunity to teach mathematics concepts such as percentages and calculating averages. It’s also good for teaching your kids about choosing a good place to start looking for affordable properties - they’ll see from the statistics where properties are likely to be more reasonably priced due to lower demand.

I might also take the time to explain the phenomenon of home equity loans. This is something we never really heard about until a few years ago, and the kids are always seeing commercials for companies that offer this service and asking about it. With an older student this would be a chance to teach amortization, which I believe you’ll find in some of the Ray’s books for middle or high school math (we didn’t deal with it until pre-calculus, I think!) The opposite calculation is to figure out the math for home mortgages. If you’ve done compound interest you might want to give this challenge a try!

These are just a few ideas to get you started. I’m sure you can think of a whole plethora of other angles for a lesson on housing costs. There’s property taxes, heating costs, “green” housing, shopping for furnishings and appliances, home repair and renovations….. These are the kind of things that were reserved just for the grown-ups when we were kids, but I think we would do our kids a service by teaching them about them when they ask. It’s kind of like taking a self-defense class: practicing when there’s no great risk will help them feel more confident when they have to “work without the net.”

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

I spoke to my mother on the phone yesterday, and she was saying that she’d chatted with Dojogirl a few days before. Mom remarked on how much cooking my oldest had begun to do. It seemed to Grammy that her little grandbaby was getting grown up.

Today Dojogirl asked if she could cook all the meals - and she baked biscuits and a pie, to boot!

The Banana, for her part, has learned all of a sudden to pour hot water from the kettle. I could swear just last week she needed help to fix her morning oatmeal because the kettle was heavy, and she was afraid of getting burned. The last few days she’s been rushing out to pour my tea for me, and bringing it out to my desk before I even check to see if the kettle has boiled.

My little girls are growing up! Today I caught my “baby” washing dishes (not terribly well, but she wants to be a “big girl” too…)

I know those habit training cards have a little something to do with it (that drainboard seems to be getting filled up with clean dishes after every meal, and only since the cards were printed up!) But I think we just needed a tiny nudge for the girls to take pride in what they can do

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

Swapping old books for new ones makes really great sense for a number of reasons:

1. Make room on your already overcrowded homeschooler’s book shelves for the new books you want to buy or print;
2. Save money on new purchases by choosing a gently used book instead of a brand new copy;
3. Help the environment by “recycling” a book instead of throwing it away or letting it gather dust;
4. Help another homeschooler afford a book by swapping your used one;
5. Help an author or a publisher to build a reputation by telling other readers about them.

I was reminded today by Heidi of Southpaugh Homeschool that there were several book swapping web sites I hadn’t really taken the time to look into. So I did just that this afternoon, and I wrote about what I discovered at Ruby’s Star. I hope you’ll take a wander over there to read about all the swapping sites I found, and all the cool things you can do besides just swap books!

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!