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!

Grocery Store Math

3 February 2012 

This morning I found myself lost on the internet. I was preparing my schedule for next week and decided that I wanted to incorporate some educational flash game sites on the kids "computer days" Tuesday and Thursday. I came across Manga High, a math website where you have to sign up as a school and I registered my "home school" as a school and included on the roster, not only my own kids, but all of my nieces and nephews as well. It took up most of my morning, so I didn't get any reading done before we had to go grocery shopping.

At the grocery store I began asking the kids to locate the name label in the produce department and the prices. Ra asked me why I was getting the brown pears instead of the green pears. I had her show me the different kinds of pears she saw and I helped her read the labels. There were Bartlett pears, D'Anjou pears, and Bosc pears. I had her tell me how much each cost, and which one cost most and which one cost least. I told her that was why we were buying the Bosc pears, because they were the least expensive. While picking out our pasta I had the kids find which brand was on sale and verify that it was the cheapest. Then I had Ra identify the bowtie pasta, El identified the shell pasta and Ca identified the macaroni pasta.

On the cereal isle we looked at the brand of cereal we always buy and the kids know they can pick from the "blue bag" cereals. I showed Ra where the Net Weight was written on the bags and had her compare the weight of the "blue bag" to the "orange bag" cereals. The "blue bag" was 32 oz and the "orange bag" was 39 oz. She told me there was a difference of 7 oz and that it was the "blue bag" that had fewer ounces. I then had her compare the prices. The "blue bag" cereal was $3.88 and the "orange bag" cereal was $6.79. I told her that the "orange bag" cereal was almost two times the price of the "blue bag cereal but it didn't have two times more cereal in the bag, so the "blue bag" cereal was cheaper.

We had a similar exercise when choosing Orange Juice. I started by having them identify the ones which where on sale, then had them choose the cheapest one. It was a Half Gallon for $1.99. I had Ra look at the full Gallon of the same brand to make sure that $1.99 was the best price. I had her round up $1.99 to $2.00 and figure out the cost of buying a gallon's worth of orange juice if we bought them as Half Gallons. The full Gallon orange juice wasn't on sale, but it was $3.49. Ra told me we needed to buy the Gallon orange juice and not the two Half Gallon orange juices, because it would be cheapest.

To summarize, we were at the grocery store for 30 minutes and we went over identification, pricing, grouping, colors, sorting, units of measurement, rounding, and overall I had the best shopping experience with four young kids at the grocery store I could ever have imagined. Next week I will give Ra the grocery list and have her keep track of the prices so we can know how much we will be spending before we check out.

The kids spent the rest of the day with Grandma J who is going to be out of town for a couple weeks. They went to the Aviary and the Recycle center with Grandma and had a fun time. We read for 20 minutes before the kids went to bed and I am planning on getting in a few chapters of Little Britches by Ralph Moody before I call it a night.