Tag: children and money

You win some you lose some

The school sent us a note earlier in the week to inform us that they would have a book sale yesterday for the Grade 1’s, please could we send money. Our firstborn has a bit of a checkered history with money and the tuck shop (trust me, you don’t want to know), so I made sure to ask the teacher how much money to send. R30-R50 she SMS’s back.

So, we give the fruit of our loins, our firstborn child, R50 with strict instruction that IT IS FOR BOOKS ONLY. And to bring change.

When I walked in the door last night there was a really awkward silence and I assumed that something must have gone awry.

Our eldest child, the joy of our lives, had taken his 50 SA Ront (which isn’t worth a whole lot in Dollars these days), gone to the book sale AND DIDN’T BUY A SINGLE BOOK. He did however go to the tuck shop and spend our hard earned R50 on Dilly Dallies (sp?) at R5 a piece.

He has been banned from computers, iPad and Xbox for a whole week.

On the upside, he knew to ask for 10 Dilly Dallies with his R50 and he did share.

We are just all about silver linings.

Isabel has also been entertaining us with being able to count until 1000. By ‘a 1000’ I mean that she counts until 100 and then in 100’s until 1000. We are a little gloaty about this, she is such a clever little button.

Mignon is the writer, she’s very keen to learn letters and words and really good with knowing her alphabet. Too cool.

Isabel also writes letters, but she mainly writes popopo and then asks us to read it so they can all belly-laugh until they cry.

Very entertaining this lot. We shall keep them and treasure them.

ps.  Our resident leftie, Isabel, writes from the right to the left.  Apparently this is a thing with left-handed children when they learn to write?

Chores and Pocketmoney – advice please

My friend Sue (hi Sue!) asked me about chores and pocket money recently as her daughter (and Daniel’s BFF) is also in Grade 1 this year and we agree that it is time to really start teaching our kids about the value of money*.

This is something I have been wondering about as well, so I’m crowd sourcing some answers pretty please with cream on top.

At the moment our kids don’t formally do chores (beyond putting their dishes away) and we don’t want to create an environment where they only do chores because they won’t get money otherwise (I know, who am I kidding, they are kids, right?). We want it to be about getting your pocket money because you did your chores and not use it as a stick. Yes, I can see you old hands laughing in the corner over there…

I grew up a very lucky and spoilt little girl, everything was done for me and I hardly had to lift a finger when I was growing up. As lovely as this was it didn’t necessarily equip me for beginning to cook or mop floors or pick up dog poo or take out the trash. So I’m going to put my own Working Mother guilt aside and do our kids a huge favour.

Here are the questions I have:

At what age did your kids start with chores?

What type of chores do your kids do? (Age appropriately)

Do you make use of charts and if so, how do you make them work? (I’m not sure that will work here, purely because there would be too many adults involved in monitoring, thus more room for error)

Do you link chores to pocket money or do they just get an allowance. If so, how much at what age?

 

Thank you!

*Daniel very smartly told us one morning this week after he had left his takkies at school the previous day that he doesn’t really care, Mommy will buy more.  Horror does not begin to describe the looks on our faces.