Staying Within a Grocery Budget

15 February 2012

My little Ca had an ear ache last night and so I didn't get much sleep which in turn led to a late morning. After breakfast I had Ra help me put together our grocery list. I told her what we needed and she wrote it down. At the grocery store I had Ra write down the cost of each item we were purchasing.

With the produce I explained to her that the price (on most items) is based on pounds. The tomatoes were $0.99 per pound and when we weighed the two tomatoes in our sack it was 1 1/8 lb. I drew a pie for Ra to show her briefly what 1/8 means. We added the $0.99 to the $0.12 (for the 1/8 lb) and come up with $1.11 for the tomatoes. She repeated this exercise with the bananas.

At the eggs I showed Ra that they sold them in increments of 6. They had a half dozen, a dozen and one and a half dozen. I had her divide 12 and 18 by 6 and we found it to be 2 and 3. We then divided the price of the 12 eggs by 2 and the price of the 18 eggs by 3. We came up with prices of $0.99 for the half dozen, $0.74 for the dozen and $0.73 for the one and a half dozen. This wasn't really an exercise we needed to do because I always buy the one and a half dozen because that is how many eggs we use in a week, but it was instructional for Ra and I think she enjoyed it.

Since we bought two loaves of bread and two gallons of milk and two bags of cereal I had her add the price of two together. At the end of our trip the list looked like this:

eggs...........$2.19
bread.........$1.98
milk............$4.58
bananas......$1.65
tomatoes....$1.11
cereal.........$6.74
tortillas.......$0.99
tea...........+ $2.66
                 $21.88


When settled at home again I had Ra write her spelling words two times each. I used the synonyms for "symmetry" for her spelling words this week. Her words are:

equal
symmetry
balance
proportion
unity
consonance
symphony
coherence


I worked on her printing with her a little bit, asking her to focus on making her writing neat and exact. I also needed to remind her several times that it is okay to erase, that is why we write in pencil, so we may be able to fix our mistakes. I also had El practice writing with "A" and "1". After that we watched a few videos from Have Fun Teaching and then watched Donald in Mathmagic Land. I used to watch it a bunch as a kid though I never realized how full of information it is!

I did research on line trying to find some Homeschool Co-ops in my area and found that there was a group meeting in an hour for a once a month get together. I hurried my kids out to the car and called my dad inquiring if he would look after the kids for me. He agreed and I met with the wonderful ladies. They were informative and friendly. I only wished that they were a little closer. They gave me information on how to go about locating the homeschool co-ops that would be in my area. I plan on doing some of that tomorrow as I am falling asleep while typing at the moment I need to go to sleep. Sweet dreams!