Unschooling and allowance and math

Each of my kids gets an allowance. The amount has varied some over the years. Right now, they each get $10 per week. They don't have to do anything to earn that money; it's simply their share of the family income. (And when you think of it that way, $10 per week is not so much!)

The idea is that having money to spend will help them learn how to spend money. I think having a relatively generous allowance gives them more room to learn. I mean, about all you learn when all you have is $2 is that $2 doesn't buy much! At the level they're at, they can actually buy something now and then. They get practice choosing between desired items and saving for more expensive items (without being completely discouraged about how long it's taking), and they are learning how to make a dollar stretch.

The other area that this ready money addresses is math. Every time they go shopping anywhere, they get some math practice. They don't think of it that way -- they're just shopping -- but math happens anyway. Without teaching, they can figure percentages, estimate totals, multiply prices by quantities (or, in Chloe's case, add all those like prices together impressively quickly), and so on. This real life math is natural to them, stress free and practical. It's a far cry from the "I hate math" comments we were hearing when they were in school.

In fact, for most of us, it is only in school that math is something separate. The reality is that math is as much a part of everyday life as reading, writing, and speaking. Here's something I wrote recently about math in our lives:

"I've noticed quite a bit of math going on in our house lately, but I'm probably the only one who characterized it as such. My daughters were figuring out how many of these, estimating how much of that, playing with a new calculator, figuring a tip, calculating how many dollars this many [British] pounds is, measuring each other for their passport applications and talking about converting inches to feet, noticing patterns in some fractions, figuring out which new cage would give the rats the most floor area, asking questions about sales tax percentages, figuring out how many notebooks they could get for so many dollars at Target's 10-notebooks-for-a-dollar sale and how many pages that would be at 70 pages per notebook, and so on. They did all of this in a very matter-of-fact way: I need or want this information, and I'm going to figure it out. It's not 'math' to them, it's just taking care of business."

And how does all this translate to the math-on-paper skills the schools hope (but so often fail) to impart? Very well, actually. Neither girl has plans at the moment for going back to our lovely public schools, but I have every confidence they could slide back into the school flow with their former classmates without any difficulty. Except perhaps extreme boredom! ;-)