Hope For Homeschoolers

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Public and even private schooled students consider Saturday and Sunday as their days off, but in our home school, the learning has often just begun. I like to call my husband our activity director, because if he is home on the weekends, he finds all kinds of neat little day trips and even weekend trips for us. On such weekends, we have visited Ft. Davis, where they have the famous Macdonald Observatory. We have put our coupons together for a weekend in New Mexico, touring such places as Carlsbad Caverns, and the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens. A week or two before our littlest home schooler was born, we spent a weekend in Alpine and Marfa, touring museums, parks, and seeing the wonderful Marfa Lights.

These little trips don’t normally don’t cost us very much, and here’s why:
1. We pick up all of the little travel discount brochures along the way that we find in convenience stores, rest stops, etc. Not only do you find excellent coupons, but you get maps that show how to get to your favorite attractions. Also, don’t forget to get the coupons from the Sunday paper!
2. When looking for a motel room, we look for one that has a coupon, a microwave, refrigerator, AND free continental breakfast. That sounds like a long list of demands, but you can put your money toward more fun and souvenirs if those qualifications can be met when staying overnight.
3. If we know what we want to do in a given location, I like to call ahead of time to verify business hours and overall cost. Finding out how much money we need ahead of time will avoid unpleasant surprises when we get there. For example, my husband wanted to take us to Sonora Caverns one weekend and was wanting to just pack us up and go. Fortunately, I called them to find out their admission prices, and it was going to cost us almost a hundred dollars for all of us to visit the caverns. I then called Carlsbad Caverns, which is about the same distance from our home, and it was going to be less then $20.00 for us to get in, plus there was more to see and do. Other attractions in the same area cost little or nothing at all. Therefore, a little research helped us to plan a better trip for a lot less money.

For the past few months, economics have kept us from going out as much as we would like. However, it has been the perfect opportunity to visit family and friends, attend birthday parties, and just hang out together at home. Yesterday, my girls planted onions in the yard, and we wrote prayers on little slips of paper to plant with them, thanking God for our home, family, and all of the onions that we are about to receive. Onions are a staple for cooking in our area, and we agreed that we may not want to eat a yard full of onions, but we can trade them with other people for other things, give them away, cook some to freeze and so on. Those are the days that I feel that we are truly blessed, because it seems that we can turn anything into a project, and our projects often have more meaning behind them than those of many classrooms. Our tests aren’t about meeting state standards for education, but about making a good life in an unstable world.

Have a Great Day!
Laurel Santiago