My husband and I were asked to speak in our ward’s sacrament meeting for Easter Sunday. If you aren’t familiar with our church that meant that we were in charge of giving the Easter sermon for our congregation – a pretty daunting task! I thought I would share the transcript of my talk here. If you have followed my blog for awhile and/or follow me on Facebook a lot of what is here will likely seem familiar – I combined the content from several past posts to get the base of the talk and then added and changed things from there. If you would like to see Eric’s talk he posted it here – it was fantastic and absolutely worth your time to go and read.
In our family it is a running joke that I cannot get through a single episode of the Chosen without dissolving into tears. Part of the joke though is that I pretend with my kids that it’s not the Chosen that makes me cry (although it totally is, it’s my favorite show and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It’s completely free to watch through their app. The first couple episodes are a little slow but it’s worth sticking through them). I’ll play it off like, “oh no, I wasn’t crying, I think there are just a lot of allergens in this show. Man, why are you guys chopping ALL the onions in the theater room?” While I joke about it, the truth is that there is nothing that pierces my heart like the love of our Savior, which is portrayed powerfully and relatably in that show. I’ll admit, I’m a little nervous about giving this talk because with it being Easter Sunday the love of our Savior is exactly what I’ll be talking about. I’m not sure I can do this without ugly crying. If anyone wants to pray that I can share my message without being a sobbing mess, I would appreciate it.
A few years ago I heard a bishop tell a story from when he was a young father. It was getting close to Easter and he and his wife had decided to read through the New Testament about the days leading up to Jesus’s crucifixion with their children. On Good Friday his wife had to work and he was trying to wrangle the kids while reading. The reading had been chaos and he didn’t think anyone had been paying attention (I’m sure scripture study never goes like this in anyone else’s household). As he was getting to the part about the crucifixion he looked up and saw his 5 year old daughter crying. Assuming her brother had hit her, the father asked what was wrong. She surprised him by responding, “Daddy, why did they kill Jesus?” The father paused for a moment trying to come up with an answer that a young child would understand. He thought about the political situation in Jerusalem at the time. He considered the Pharisees and the Romans, the different power struggles, the controversial teachings Jesus had shared. Not being able to come up with an on level answer for a child he asked his daughter, “What do you think?” After a moment she responded, “They must not have known how much He loved them.”
This story is personal for me because the bishop of that ward was my dad and the little girl was me. The question is one I have pondered for more years than I realized. How could anyone kill our Savior? I struggle to understand how people could treat ANYONE the way that Christ was treated, let alone our Savior. Only hours before He had suffered for every pain, sin and sorrow that they would endure in their lives. Still they took Him, beat Him and nailed Him to a cross. Truly, they must not have known how much He loved them.
Despite their incredible ignorance of who He was, as they gathered around to mock Him, flog Him and kill Him Christ’s response was, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Not only did he forgive the very people who were killing Him, but He forgave them while they were in the very act of taking His life. He didn’t wait for them to realize what they’d done wrong, or feel any remorse, or even stop doing it. They had beaten and humiliated Him, cast lots on His clothes and nailed Him to a cross, and while they were yet reviling Him and watching Him suffer and die – He forgave them.
Last month my 8-year-old daughter was baptized. As we were getting ready I remembered my own baptism day. My 8 year old self thought, “Ok, you’re all clean so it’s easy now, just don’t sin and you’ve made it!” I’m sure you will be shocked to know that… I didn’t manage to do that… not even close. I can’t remember what particular thing I did that made me feel like I’d blown it but I do know that it happened and much sooner than I would have ever hoped. I remember feeling so disappointed that I’d had a perfectly clean slate and I’d messed it up.
As I was remembering that experience I remembered a storyline from The Chosen. (I told you I love the show, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it came up) In the first few episodes we meet Mary Magdalene who is possessed by an evil spirit. Jesus cures her, forgives her and she joins his followers. Throughout the following episodes Mary is THE model follower of Christ. She tells someone who is surprised to see her change that, “I was one way, and now I am completely different, and the thing that happened in between was Him.” She testifies, she brings others to Christ, she is always helpful – truly the kind of follower we would all wish to be. Until one day she is triggered by some remembrances of her past. In a moment of weakness she leaves Christ’s disciples and returns to her previous ways – discarding everything she knows. The disciples search for her, find her in a really low place and drag her back to Jesus.
When she returns she doesn’t even want to face Christ, but she is given a moment to talk with Him. She says “I’m so ashamed. You redeemed me and I just threw it all away. away.” I think this reflects so perfectly how we all feel when we can see that we’ve done things that we knew better than to do. We feel so guilty to have given up what we KNEW was right. He replies, “It’s not much of a redemption if it can be lost in a day, is it?” Mary responds, “I owe You everything, but I just don’t think I can do it.” He tells her, “I just want your heart. The Father just wants your heart. Give Us that, which you already have, and the rest will come in time. Did you really think you’d never struggle or sin again?” After more dialogue back and forth with Mary beating herself up and the Savior soothing her He says, “I forgive you. It’s over.”
I think what I most appreciated about this scene was that Jesus doesn’t roll his eyes saying, “Yup, you really messed up huh? Alright, I guess I’ll forgive you this one time, but you’re really pushing your luck. Don’t you remember, we already went through this once? How do I know you really mean it this time? You better not mess up again.” Instead what he says is, “Did you really think you’d never struggle or sin again?” His forgiveness was not conditional on her never slipping up. Jesus wasn’t even surprised that Mary didn’t overcome everything in an instant.
In the Women’s session of this last General Conference Elder Renlund shared, “Even after sincere repentance, however, we may stumble. Stumbling does not mean that the repentance was inadequate but may simply reflect human weakness.” He then shared this statement from Elder Scott, “The joyful news for anyone who desires to be rid of the consequences of past poor choices is that the Lord sees weaknesses differently than He does rebellion. […] when the Lord speaks of weaknesses, it is always with mercy.”
I think often we expect once we repent we are now miraculously going to be perfect from here on out. In the show Christ points out how unrealistic this is. He KNOWS we’re going to mess things up – in fact He is expecting us to mess up. I’m going to go so far as to say that if we’re not messing things up we probably aren’t learning and growing in which case we’re defeating the purpose of our lives here.
Two weeks ago Elder Ochoa shared – “Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness has another name—the plan of redemption. The plan was not for us to glide easily through life, never stumbling, never sinking, with a smile always on our face. Heavenly Father knew that we would need to be redeemed. This is why He prepared the plan of redemption. This is why He sent a Redeemer. When we struggle—for any reason—that does not mean the plan isn’t working. That is when we need the plan the most!”
If you’ve done much study on the topic of growth mindset this makes sense – we can only grow when we are allowed a safe space in which to make mistakes. Through His Atonement Jesus has given us that safe space. That’s what this earth life is for. Christ tells us, “I’ve got this. You keep trying, and go ahead, mess it up a bit. I’ve already got you covered. All I ask is that you don’t give up. We’re going to get you to perfection TOGETHER.”
We get a chance to renew our covenants each week when we take the sacrament – but the Atonement has already covered our mistakes before we even make them. Of course that means we still need to try to do right and make amends when we do wrong – but in the eyes of our Heavenly Father we don’t have to wait to “measure up” again – He loves us in the middle of the messes we make. We need to stop beating ourselves up and accept Him telling us, “I forgive you. It’s over.” Even when we slip up, even when we go back and do the very thing that we’ve said we wouldn’t allow ourselves to do again – we are not past forgiveness just because we didn’t overcome in an instant. The author Lisa Bevere tweeted, “If you think you’ve blown God’s plan for your life, rest in this: YOU, my beautiful friend, are not that powerful.” So what should we do when we slip up? Elder Holland put it beautifully when he said, “Don’t you quit. You keep walking. You keep trying. There is help and happiness ahead. Some blessings come soon, some come late, and some don’t come until heaven; but for those who embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ, they come. It will be all right in the end. Trust God and believe in good things to come.”
Do you believe in those good things to come? Do you believe that Christ’s atonement can work – even for you? Will you let it? Do YOU realize how much your Savior loves you? I wonder, if more people understood the love of their Savior would we have the violence and hatred and wars that plague our world today? We read in 4 Nephi about the people who live in absolute peace for 300 years. While usually I feel disheartened that this peace lasts for less than a single page of the over 500 page book, do you realize that the period of time it describes is about a quarter of the time period of the whole record? Could it be that once the people had met Christ and understood fully how He loved them that nothing else was as important? If you can understand how much your Savior loves YOU, it will change your life.
I want to bear my testimony, that I know that our Savior loves each of us, deeply, and personally. His greatest desire is for our happiness and we can achieve that happiness by following the gospel He preached. Please, if you haven’t felt the love of our Savior pray to feel it. Ask for the opportunity to catch a glimpse of that love and hold on to it tightly.
I know that through Christ’s Atonement we won’t be chained to our mistakes forever – when we turn to Him and He forgives us, it’s over. Please don’t waste His gift by holding onto a grudge against yourself. Accept His forgiveness and let it propel you to do better and be better. I am forever grateful for this knowledge and love our Savior. I share this message, and Christ’s love for each and every one of you in His name, Jesus Christ, Amen.
Today in our Relief Society lesson we were discussing Dallin H. Oaks’ talk “Be of Good Cheer” I read through the talk yesterday and then I came across this quote from Elder Jeffrey R. Holland –
“We should honor the Savior’s declaration to “be of good cheer.” (Matthew 14:27) Indeed, it seems to me we may be more guilty of breaking that commandment than almost any other!”
I was somewhat distressed by the notion of being of good cheer being a commandment. I am in no ways pessimistic by nature, but I have long held the belief that it’s very important that we acknowledge hard experiences as being hard. I don’t believe we would have been given the commandment to mourn with those who mourn to just brush off trials as no big deal. Obviously it’s not helpful to wallow in misery and sadness, but there’s a huge range of things to experience between wallowing and just pretending everything is sunshiney while a hurricane rages. The two notions had been battling themselves out in my head when I arrived at Relief Society this afternoon.
Our teacher started her lesson by talking about how being of good cheer didn’t necessarily mean being happy all the time. I started listening in hard. Wait, it doesn’t? Isn’t that what it means to be of good cheer? If you think of someone who is “cheery” isn’t that someone who is always sort of naively smiley and happy? I felt like both a giant idiot and a huge nerd but I decided to stop and pull up the dictionary to get the definition of “cheer”. Obviously I knew what the word meant, I can use it in a sentence, but I felt like I needed some perspective. Here’s what I read –
cheer /CHir/
verb 1. shout for joy or in praise or encouragement. 2. give comfort or support to.
noun 1. a shout of encouragement, praise, or joy. 2. cheerfulness, optimism, or confidence.
I don’t know why but in the context of “Be of Good Cheer” those definitions hadn’t even crossed my mind. You know what I didn’t read in that definition? Happy shiney Pollyanna naivete – which was everything I had always heard in the commandment to “be of good cheer.” In fact, happy didn’t even factor into the definition. I was most struck by the fact that cheer was first a verb – it’s the act of giving encouragement. Of course I knew that, I come from a sports family. Do you know how many Saturdays I have spent sitting in bleachers cheering for my siblings as they played baseball, basketball or soccer?
When you are cheering for someone you’re not celebrating an accomplished victory, you’re in the midst of the struggle. You may give a final triumphant cheer at the end of the game, but most of the cheering happens long before the contest is decided – in fact cheering is a thing because the contest isn’t decided. It wouldn’t do you any good to tell a pitcher after the game “hey, we believe in you, you’re going to do great!” – it’s a little late at that point.
That completely changed my perspective on what it means to “be of good cheer”. The purpose of being of good cheer is optimism and hope. I can recognize that things are hard and hope that things will get better. In fact isn’t that exactly what Jesus said when giving his commandment?
These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.
Jesus is not saying everything is going to be great and sunshiney and perfect. In fact, quite the opposite. He doesn’t tell us that we might have tribulation, he tells us we shall have tribulation. How can he then tell us to “be of good cheer”, aren’t tribulation and cheer mutually exclusive?? No! Even though we have tribulations – we can have hope, we can have confidence, we can have optimism. Yes, the things we are facing now are hard – but Jesus has overcome them. What could be more hopeful than that?
We’re still in the middle of the game. We might even be down in points. The other team might look bigger, scarier and stronger than we are. They may have even roughed us up a little bit and we’re hurting bad. But with Christ we will prevail. As we turn to Him and put our trust in Him we have every reason to “be of good cheer” because He is the giver of perfect confidence. He has already won the game, we just need to stick through to the end to join him in victory. I can think of no greater encouragement than that.
“When the time for decision arrives, the time for preparation is past.”
― Thomas S. Monson
This quote hit home for me literally this past June when a huge wildfire raged near our family’s home. The picture in my header was taken by my husband from our front porch at 1am as we were scrambling to evacuate. Within a couple of hours we went from heading to bed to hauling our kids down the mountain to an emergency shelter. Fortunately the story ended well – firefighters were able to contain the flames before they got any closer to our neighborhood and no properties were lost. Aside from a night of almost zero sleep we were no worse for the wear.
However, that night highlighted for me how inadequately prepared we were for an emergency. We had a great evacuation list for our valuable items (I’ll write about that in another post) but our 72 hour kits were so inadequate as to be virtually non-existant. Even though our evacuation lasted less than 12 hours – and half of those were spent in a local Holiday Inn – I was acutely aware of how much better off we could have been.
As I’ve watched other events unfold in our world in the last year I decided it was time to really get my act together. I’ve researched several different blogs and sites to come up with what exactly I needed to have in my kits and spent a couple months assembling them. I wanted to share all of my research so you can be better prepared too.
Resources Used
First I should say that I am NOT an expert in this area. I’ve simply taken the information that I gleaned from several awesome sources and paired it with my own experiences and knowledge. So to give credit where credit is due – here are some of the resources that I most appreciated –
I’ve broken this guide into sections to make it a little easier to digest with a full list in a google document at the end of this post. I tried to start with what I felt was most important both for categories, and then prioritized again for items within each category. Here’s how I would recommend using this guide –
Read through this post to get an understanding for what the items are and why you would need them. Sorry, I know it’s long, but it helped me to understand why I needed the different things in my pack as I put mine together. Feel free to click here if you just want to see my supply list.
Make a copy of my google sheet for yourself and edit it to fit the things you want in your kits.
Go through your house and collect any items you already have on hand – you will be surprised by how much you can round up without spending any more money!
Go to the dollar store! SO many of the things on this list are cheapest at the dollar store. I put together our kits almost completely and then went to the dollar store to round out a few items and kicked myself because there were a lot of items that I had paid more for elsewhere.
Go to the thrift store and see what else you can get there. I picked up most of my clothing there, and even got a couple of soft blankets for just $2 each!
Prioritize the rest of the list and assemble the pieces as you can. I tried to put my list in priority order but your priorities will likely be different from mine. Each section can reasonably be done from scratch for <$25 with the exception of the section I labeled “Emergency Gear”.
Take one section at a time and build it in chunks as your finances permit until you have the whole thing together to your liking. Don’t get hung up over not having everything at once or not having the best things. If all you have is a backpack with food and water in it you’re 100% better off than you would be without it!
Another tip, if you can work with a group to purchase some of the items you can get them much cheaper in bulk. I’ve included links both in this post and on the Google doc to where you can purchase nearly every item on my list. Most are the items that I purchased myself, and if not I tried to find items that had good ratings and were well priced. Most of these links are affiliate links which means I get a small commission if you purchase your items through those links. I really appreciate those sales as they help me justify all the time I spend writing these blog posts and pay for my hosting, so I greatly appreciate you using my links.
Without any further ado, let’s dive into the guide –
Storage
You don’t have much of a kit without some way to contain all the gear together. There are many different opinions on the best methods but I decided to go with a tactical backpack. I had a hard time making this purchase because we have oodles of backpacks around our house, but as I went to pack up our gear I found I couldn’t fit everything I wanted in a normal backpack. So I purchased these bags from Stealth Angel. I was able to get them for less than $22.50 each when they were on sale and using a discount code that I got from Honey. They’re HUGE but mine are already stuffed to the brim. I got plain black ones that I felt were inconspicuous if we needed the packs to go through an airport or were in an emergency where we were still in a city. (While I was working on our kits our neighborhood book club was reading The Beekeeper of Aleppo about a refugee family which changed some of my perspective on the things I would want in my kits if we had to flee our home… I wouldn’t thought of things like having items that would be inconspicuous in public before.) I also liked that they had a molle system so that if needed we could attach sleeping bags or whatnot to the outside of the bags to get a even more mileage out of them.
As I mentioned though, the bags are gigantic, and right now I have kids who are still tiny. I feel like the most likely situation that I would use these kits in would be evacuating in a vehicle. However, for my birthday I got a folding wagon that I could throw a couple of the bags (and probably a couple of the kids) into if we ended up on foot. This wagon is a great price at Costco but it’s also available on Amazon if you don’t have a Costco membership. I think I will get a lot of mileage out of it just hauling gear to the beach or around the neighborhood. I love that it folds up so it’s easy to take places without taking up a ton of space.
For storage within the bag I like these makeup bags from Amazon. I like that they’re clear so it’s easy to see what’s inside, but they also have a lot of space. I put the food inside gallon size Ziploc bags. I also ended up using some snack size Ziploc bags to package things like q-tips, cotton balls and sterile gloves.
Finally, someday I would really like to get one or two compression sacks to better contain the clothing and bedding within the bag. I think that they would help free up a little more space in the bag and make things feel a bit more organized.
Ok, you now have something to put your stuff in, let’s figure out what stuff we need!
Food
I’m starting with food because it’s obviously the most important. Even in our brief 12 hour evacuation to the Holiday Inn I wished I’d had some food packed with us. Why? We happened to be evacuated on a Sunday. So even though we were within yards of a Walmart and a McDonalds, I didn’t really want to be breaking the sabbath to feed my family breakfast. Obviously being evacuated from your house due to a fire would qualify as an “ox in the mire” situation, but I still wished I’d had something on hand to feed them. None of the rest of your gear matters much if you starve to death so let’s start there.
There are a lot of different ideas for what food should go into a 72 hour kit and you should do whatever works best for you. But here’s what I came up with. My priorities were –
2,000+ calories per person per day – Even though I have smaller kids I wanted to make that even if we were in a situation that required a lot of exertion no one would be hungry. Some people pack more for an adult man than for a small child to save weight, but I figured if there was food leftover then we could share or last for more days.
Food my kids would eat – I think that’s pretty self-explanatory. There’s no point in packing food that my kids would turn their noses up at.
Food that wouldn’t crush, squish or leak – I see lot of recommendations for packing things like crackers, cookies or soft granola bars. However I avoided them as I felt like they were too likely to get mashed in a backpack.
No utensils, heating or preparation –Adding a mess kit and fuel to your bag adds a LOT of weight and takes up a ton of space. Plus you don’t know if you’ll end up somewhere that food preparation will be feasible. I was originally looking at freeze dried meals but I found that it was easily twice the amount of weight when you considered bringing enough water to prepare those foods – before you even accounted for a way to boil the water. Everything here literally only requires unwrapping and putting into your mouth.
Same food in every kit – I guarantee you that if we were stuck in the wilderness and my 9yo had a blue Jolly Rancher and my 6yo had a red Jolly Rancher there would be a fight. So every kit not only has the same general foods but I went so far as to make sure that they have the same exact flavors in each kit. I felt like the world’s most OCD person but I decided I had more patience to do that now than I would in the midst of an emergency.
Variety of flavors – This was difficult to do while fitting in with my other criteria but I did try to make sure that each day had a variety of sweet, salty, fruity, meaty as well as a combination of textures.
Separate packs for each day – I put each day’s rations into a separate bag to maintain that variety of flavors in a day. Otherwise I envisioned my kids eating all of the beef jerky sticks gone on day 1 and having only oats & honey granola bars left on day 3. Also, hopefully by having it divided and labeled by day my kids won’t pilfer snacks.
This is what my rations looked like for my family of 6
I made a plan for a day’s rations that fit my above criteria and then I made 3 packs for each person’s kit and labelled them by day. Each day’s rations basically consisted of the following –
Like I said, not very exciting, but it will keep you alive and I tried to work in as much variety as I could. The water is definitely sparing but water is HEAVY! If we were evacuating in a vehicle I would grab our water storage and have the kids fill up their water bottles on the way out. You wouldn’t have any water in this pack for washing but you wouldn’t die of dehydration. The mini jerky sticks are a HUGE add as far as calories and flavor variety so I highly recommend them. The 10 granola bars is actually 2 each of 5 different granola bars. I figure you could have 3 granola bars for each meal and 1 extra for a snack or added into one of your meals. You would be really tired of granola bars after 3 days but at least with 5 different types you’d have some variety. Also I recognize that I have 5 beverage additions with only 3 water pouches. I bought the crystal light at Costco and there were 4 flavors in the box, so it seemed easier to put all 4 flavors in for each day than try to pick which ones went on each day – and as I already mentioned we’re hoping that the water in the pack isn’t ALL you have. The hot chocolate was totally frivolous, especially without a way to boil water or extra water. But I figured it added such a negligible amount of weight and if there was a way to make it up in a crisis, that could go a long way to lifting spirits (at least it would for me!). Also it was already in my pantry so I thought I would put it in.
I do want to add that after I finished putting together my packs I found that you can get peanut butter in squeeze pouches for about 25 cents each on Amazon and they fit all of my criteria that I listed above. My only concern is finding something non-perishable that wouldn’t crush to eat with it. Tuna pouches are also a great way to add variety to your ration bags but again, I’m not sure that they sound all that appetizing without a cracker or something to eat it with.
I unpacked my 72 hour kit to take pictures for this post and I could tell that already if I had picked food items that would crush… they would be crushed. So the non-crushing thing is definitely a deal breaker for me. But I’m all ears if anyone has a solution! Leave a comment and I will be sure to update this post with other alternatives!
Clothing
The clothing I suggest packing is –
2 sets of thermals
3 pairs of socks
2 pairs hiking pants
2 t-shirts
3 sets of underwear
1 pair waterproof gloves/mittens
1 beanie
Yes I realize that I forgot to pull out the socks and underwear for this picture, just imagine they’re in the picture ;P
Let’s start by pointing out the things that aren’t in my list that seem necessary. Most importantly – a sturdy pair of shoes. I know that these are super critical, but even with my super huge packs there’s only so much space. I haven’t found a way to justify adding a bulky pair of sneakers to the pack without sacrificing so much other necessary gear. I figure that if I’m leaving the house, I have shoes on and that’s going to be what I have. I also have the problem with my children that they’re constantly changing shoe sizes – I don’t have an old pair of sneakers that they won’t miss from their closets just lying around. If you can find a way to fit them though it would be a good idea to add some sneakers.
The other major thing that seems to be missing is a jacket or coat of some sort. I live where it gets COLD and a coat would be absolutely critical for much of the year. However, just like with the sneakers, a coat takes up an inordinate amount of space. If it’s the time of year when I need a coat I’m not likely to leave home without one. Also I picked layers that would keep me warm and packed a few extra emergency blankets. In a pinch I can wrap up in the blankets to keep warm if I ended up without my coat, and the emergency blankets take up almost zero space in my bag.
Ok, so on to the things that I DO have in my pack. The reason I went with thermals is that they provide a lot of warmth for very little weight/space. You can also pick them up for fairly inexpensively.
I will note that the thermals I linked to are a little bit sheer, so you can’t plan on wearing them on their own, but as a base layer under a shirt and some pants they will do great. Which is why I have suggested hiking pants and t-shirts as well.
Hiking pants are great because they’re durable, not too heavy for the summer, and will dry out quickly if they get wet. They’re also lightweight and pack nicely into a bag like this. However, I don’t actually have hiking pants in my pack because I couldn’t justify the cost. My pack has two pairs of sweatpants that I picked up at Deseret Industries for $2 each. If you can’t supply the “ideal” item, find whatever you can that will fit and pack that. Remember, done is better than perfect! You can always go back and swap in the “ideal” item later.
This seems like a really long list, but a lot of it can easily be sourced if you’ve brought home mini shampoos, soaps and lotions from a hotel. Otherwise you can get nearly everything on the list for a dollar or less. I packed my own little snack bags with Q Tips and cotton balls so I didn’t have a bajillion in my pack. The one thing on there that probably seems totally frivolous is the dry shampoo. It just seemed like a nice thing to have on hand if I were in a situation where I couldn’t take an actual shower but needed to freshen up a little bit.
First Aid
If you want to make putting a first aid kit together really easy then I recommend picking up this first aid kit from Amazon. It is well stocked and organized and in one click you’re basically done. However, as of this writing the kit is about $47 – which was a little more than I was willing to pay for first aid kits for my kids. So I built my own using another clear plastic makeup bag. In each bag I put the following –
You may notice that I didn’t put quantities next to each item. Most of the things I bought for my kits were purchased in bulk and I didn’t see any good reason to let good items go to waste. So I just took whatever I had and divided it by the people in our family. So I have an unreasonable amount of some of the medications in our packs, but I figure that – as the weight they add is negligible – I would rather have too much and be able to last longer or help other people than leave things behind. I also tried to think through if I needed those medications for the full 72 hours how many doses would I actually need? That didn’t convince me to bring 72 tums (which I think would be a bad idea to take anyways) but it did help me think through having enough pain killers to get through the full time period.
Emergency Gear
It probably seems odd to have a section labeled “Emergency Gear” in a post about emergency packs – technically everything in the pack is emergency gear. This section I reserved for more of wilderness survival gear.
To start I would make sure your pack has the first 6 items and then slowly add the rest. I chose a headlamp in lieu of any other flashlight because I think they’re the most versatile. In an emergency having your light always shining where you’re looking is really helpful, especially if you can do it without tying up your hands. One year for Christmas I gave my kids their 72 hour kit headlamps in their stockings. It was one of the best Christmas presents! They were SO excited about them – although it took awhile for me to get them wrangled back into the actual 72 hour kits. I currently have the one that I have labeled as the “best reviewed” and I pull it out all the time when I need a flashlight. My kids have the inexpensive ones and we’ve been really happy with them – but I included a link to the more upgraded pick that’s more similar to my own headlamp. The last one I haven’t tested myself but the reviews look good and the price is awesome so I would probably recommend grabbing those if you’re on a budget.
We have all three of the multitools that are listed. The Leatherman Wave is definitely the best – but you pay for the quality. The Gerber is a really great tool as well and you won’t be disappointed by it. The off-brand tool we just picked up for our kids’ packs and we were able to get them for $13 each! We were actually surprisingly impressed with the sturdiness of them and how much functionality they packed into them. They don’t measure up to the Leatherman or the Gerber, but I expect they would serve our kids quite well for the price we paid.
Emergency blankets might be one of the most important items in your kit for the price. You can pick them up for <$1 a piece and they have SO many functions. Obviously you can use them to keep warm, but you can also build a shelter out of them, or a solar oven, or catch rainwater, keep your gear dry etc. You might notice that I don’t have any sort of tent in my kits. I plan that we would use the paracord, emergency blankets and duct tape to create our own shelter if the need arose. Hopefully we would bring our real tent or have our vehicles for shelter, but in a pinch the emergency blankets would do. I have 5 or more in each pack since they’re so inexpensive and lightweight – that gives enough that you can wrap yourself up in one, have some cover from the ground, build a tent, collect rainwater and still have one to spare.
The rain ponchos I included aren’t fancy but they would be helpful to round out the clothing selections as a waterproof layer. You could also make one out of the emergency blankets or the trash bags in a pinch. I would really like to upgrade ours to the reusable kind as I think they’ll work much better, but I couldn’t justify the cost just now so that will have to be a down the road upgrade.
I always thought that the FRS and HAM radios were a little bit silly. I mean, I have a cell phone with me at all times, when would I ever need a radio instead? However, a couple years ago my husband was in Southern California when major wildfires were raging. The internet went out and the cell towers went down. Despite being a licensed HAM radio operator he hadn’t brought his radio with him. He didn’t know what was happening with the fires or if they needed to prepare to evacuate. The only way he could get any information was through me. I would watch the news in Utah then send him a text messages and if we were lucky – he would get my text messages. It was nerve wracking for everyone! Having an FRS or HAM radio can help you to get critical information in that sort of situation. Don’t underestimate how important it is!
If you can swing it I would recommend getting a portable solar panel so you can charge your batteries if necessary. I didn’t include that in the main list though since it’s definitely a stretch goal.
Trash bags are useful for a number of things besides just packing out your garbage. They can be used as a tarp or to help create a shelter. They can also be used to create a pit toilet. I’ve also read that in really dire situations they can be used as a body bag. I’m going to pray now that no one who uses this list will ever have to use those bags for that purpose though.
A paper map might seem so antiquated. However, just like the radios they can be immeasurably helpful if things are going really wrong. If you needed to leave the state without the internet you would definitely need a map. The chance of needing one is pretty low and I will admit that I haven’t yet made that investment myself (they aren’t expensive but once you multiply the cost by the 6 people in my family… it’s a little much), but your kit isn’t complete without it.
Cash is good to have in case card readers go out or for bartering with other people. This is also something that I haven’t actually put in our kits yet because I haven’t decided how much should go in each pack. Make sure you have small bills so you’re not forced to pay more for supplies if someone can’t (or won’t) make change. I’ve also read the suggestion to separate the cash into different parts of your pack so you don’t have to pull out a whole wad in the middle of negotiations. Alternatively I’ve been told that silver coins can be good for bartering if the money system has also failed – they’re small enough to be portable, retain their value regardless of inflation and a small enough denomination to use for more basic bartering. I haven’t looked into doing that myself but I think it’s an interesting suggestion.
You may notice that I don’t have a link to a survival guide yet. I haven’t found quite what I’m looking for yet (please send me suggestions if you have them!). I want to find a book that is compact and has a lot of basic survival information – first aid, building a shelter, building a fire, foraging for food etc. Most of the guides I’ve found are too specialized or overly advanced. For now I’ve put my old Young Women’s camp manual in my pack.
Comfort
Comfort items might seem frivolous but it’s likely that you will find yourself just waiting around somewhere and having something to do will be priceless. I tried to pick a few items that would be useful and could keep you occupied for awhile. Here’s my list –
A notebook and pen can come in useful for a lot of things. It would give you a place to record some of your experience so you can remember things later. You can also use the paper as a way to leave a note for someone as might be needed (if you keep this in your car it would be a good way to leave your information in case of an accident in a parking lot). It can also be used for drawing paper.
I chose colored pencils rather than crayons or markers for my packs because they won’t melt or dry out. The pencils I linked to are great because they’re small and come with their own sharpener.
A blanket takes up a LOT of space in the pack which makes it a little hard to justify. However I know that, especially for my kids, having something soft to snuggle up in would be worth its weight in gold in an emergency! I recommend getting a full twin sized blanket that you could actually sleep under rather than just a throw sized blanket. If you pair this with your emergency blanket you’re in nearly as good of shape as having a legit sleeping bag! I found a couple at the thrift store for only $2 and they often go on sale for Black Friday. The ones that I linked to are just over $10 each and were what we had in our kits. After I showed my mom what I was putting in my packs she showed me these fleece sleeping bag liners and she bought us each one for Christmas (thanks mom!) to go in our 72 hour kits. They’re surprisingly inexpensive (we got ours at just over $11 each) and are really multifunctional. They unzip completely to make a big picnic blanket, or can zip together to make a double sized sleeping bag. Plus to have yourself fully covered would be really nice. They aren’t as soft or as thick as the other blankets I recommended, but they’re a great size and I think the trade off for the functionality is worth it.
A set of playing cards can give you a lot of different activities for a small footprint – go fish with little kids, solitaire, or any number of card games with friends. I would really like to find a compact book that I could add in with instructions for lots of different card games and maybe some magic tricks, but I haven’t found exactly what I want yet.
I picked up our activity and coloring books at the Dollar Store. They had a few that were mini sized there. However there are some awesome looking ones on Amazon too – I included links to more of the ones that I thought looked the best on the Google document.
I know that an eye mask and ear plugs seem like weird things to put in a 72 hour kit, but if you were stuck in an evacuation center overnight having a way to block out the lights and sounds would be priceless.
I don’t have inflatable pillows or sleeping pads in our kits yet. I do think though that they would be so nice to have if you had to sleep away from home. I know I don’t love sleeping on the ground anymore so those definitely are high on my upgrades priority list!
Conclusion
Hopefully this is helpful to you as you put together your own 72 hour kits. Remember – done is better than perfect! Do what you can for now and be happy to have something! You can add the rest as you go. Without further ado here is the link to my Google sheet –
Before you start checking things off on the list MAKE A COPY FOR YOURSELF! To do this go to File> Make a Copy and it will allow you to make changes – I will not grant you editing access so don’t bother requesting it (then everyone would see your list, which isn’t really what you want anyways). As you check things off the list you’ll notice that the items will go from having a red background to having a white background. I felt like this was helpful for me to easily see what I had left to gather.
All of the links that I included above are in the google sheet so hopefully you won’t have to keep going back and forth. Good luck with putting your kits together and stay safe!
For the last 6 months my church congregation has not met traditionally because of the lockdowns stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. In the coming weeks and months we are anticipating starting to hold more regular meetings – even if it still looks different than it had been. Before we go back to these more normal settings I wanted to record some of my thoughts and feelings on what I’ve learned about the Sabbath and church over the last six months.
I will start with a description of what our Sundays looked like pre-lockdown and post-lockdown. I have a feeling that even after all of these lockdowns finish church might never go back to being the same as it was before. I’m hoping that there are things that we’ve learned from this experience that will help us to make our church attendance even more meaningful in the future, so I want to record now what it has been so I can remember in the future.
Pre-Lockdown Sabbath
Ok, so this picture is from my brother’s wedding and outside the temple rather than outside a church building, but you get the idea 😛
This year our ward met at 10:30am (which is my favorite time for church, I’m really ticked that COVID has robbed us of so many months of that meeting time). Each Sunday morning I would need to get all 6 of us showered, dressed, hair done, fed, diaper bag packed, lessons prepared, shoes on and everyone in the car by about 10:20am.
Since my husband rarely gets up before 9am (and I try to avoid traipsing the kids in and out of our bathroom while he sleeps) the whole rigamorole had to happen in less than an hour and a half. I would try frequently to get as much organized on Saturday night to avoid the scramble, but most Sundays still found us sliding in a little late and a lot frazzled just before the sacrament if we were lucky… just after it if we weren’t.
Sacrament meeting was frequently spent trying to keep our 2 year old reasonably reverent and the kids quietly occupied with coloring or snacks in the hope that my husband or I could glean a little bit from the 3+ talks in the meeting. I have the rule that no distractions come out until after the sacrament, and that if I have to take a child into the hall they don’t get any freedom to move around. I try to be careful not to reward misbehaving in sacrament meeting with the freedom to play in the halls. Although a lot of what I’ve written about deals more with discipline, I really did enjoy those sacrament meetings. Even when I couldn’t pay full attention to every second of the talks I pretty much always walked away with a few moments that touched my heart and had a message for me personally. Attending sacrament meeting always was a boost for my week and well worth the hassle of bringing my circus to it.
For second hour my husband would head off to Sunday School (he’s our ward’s Sunday School president), my older 3 would head off to primary, and I would go to nursery with our youngest (my current calling is as a nursery leader). I have the younger class of nursery kids so our main goal was to minimize crying for the full hour 😛 We would squeeze in a super brief lesson and have some fun with singing time, but primarily the kids played with toys and I would chat with my partner and the other parents that were trying to acclimate their kids to nursery.
I love little kids so I don’t totally mind being in the nursery but I really miss attending Relief Society. I like Sunday School well enough, but I miss Relief Society. Having the opportunity to connect with the other women in my ward is something my soul needs more than the discussions in Sunday School. It has helped at least to have another teacher that I enjoy visiting with and that we have lots of parents that end up staying around to help their kids acclimate to nursery – but it’s not the same. When I was growing up I probably would have thought that was crazy but I cannot adequately express how grateful I am for the organization of the Relief Society. Not just for the Sunday meetings but just for the unity of sisters and the support system we have. I love being a member of the Relief Society.
Having been in nursery since my oldest was in nursery (my youngest is the only one who has been good at going to nursery on his own… so of course he’s the one that I was called to be a nursery leader for :P) I have to say that I super appreciated the change from the 3 hour block to the 2 hour block for nursery kids. It’s SO much easier to keep nursery kids happy for 1 hour than 2 – not just half as easy, like 100x easier. I’ve been grateful for the opportunity to serve and I’m really grateful for the friends that I’ve made connections with as a nursery leader.
After church we would gather everyone back up, drive home, and eat lunch. By the time lunch was over I was typically EXHAUSTED and as much as I would try to stay awake I almost always would fall asleep for most of the afternoon while my husband took care of the kids. Then it was time to make dinner and feed everyone. In the evenings we would sometimes do games as a family, or go outside, or just leave everyone to their own devices. Then bedtime as usual and that’s our Sabbath.
Lockdown Sabbath
When the lockdowns started we began doing virtual “church” with my family. We would meet for about an hour on Zoom with my parents, grandparents, some of my siblings, and a rotating selection of friends from my parents’ ward that could use a group to meet with. For the first couple of months we assigned out talks and tried to make it like a sacrament meeting. About halfway through we switched to making it more of a Sunday School lesson and had a less structured Come Follow Me discussion with a song and a prayer on either side. The Come Follow Me style was much more successful and we wish we had done that from the beginning, but you live and learn 🙂
My bunch all dressed up for church at home, with the 2yo holding our speaker phone 😛
Our virtual “church” meetings have had different start times but mostly between 11am and 1pm. I have still insisted that my kids get dressed nicely for church – however shoes have not been required. It was actually funny the first time we were able to attend a sacrament meeting with our ward again because I hadn’t realized that my kids had all grown out of their church shoes – oops! It has been much more leisurely getting ready for these meetings – particularly knowing that if someone still has wet hair, no shoes, is still eating some toast etc. they can still participate in church. With the extra time/reduced stress I’ve found that I’ve been better able to do some personal Come Follow Me study before church. I’ve gotten SO much more out of our meetings and my scripture study in general with just that little bit of study time before church. After our services ended our family would hang out on Zoom for a little while showing off whatever we were working on – gardening projects, my brother’s chickens & puppy, my dad’s woodworking, my nephews’ new squishamellows etc. It’s been fun to have a few minutes to just connect with family since we all live far apart.
We’ve had permission from our church leaders to administer the sacrament in our home. So after we finished socializing with family we would gather the kids back up on the couches and my husband would bless the bread and water and distribute it to each of us. It’s my 2yo’s favorite thing, he’s always asking us to do “prayers on bread? prayers on water?”. Even though he refuses to eat the bread, he gets SO excited to drink the water.
We found that our little multicolored Ikea cups fit nicely in our little muffin tins and so we’ve had the sacrament cups in muffin tins and the bread on a plate. I will say that I will have a hard time getting used to tiny pieces of bread and tiny cups for the sacrament again after having a 1/6th of a slice of bread and a decent drink of water each week! Distributing the sacrament to just 6 people doesn’t take very long so I instituted that after the sacrament we would do 2 minutes of meditation. That sounds fancier than it is, I just required my kids to sit quietly and take deep breaths for 2 minutes. I just wanted to still maintain a sense of reverence and pondering with our sacrament even though we didn’t have to wait for anyone else.
I found that without the anchor of church my kids had made Sunday just a play day so I instituted a new rule for our family. No friends or electronics (besides Veggie Tales/Animated Scripture videos) until 3pm. Yes, it was a super arbitrary rule but my kids needed a line of demarcation to make Sunday feel different from any other day besides the Sunday dress and the <1 hour of Zoom church. To be honest it was more of a limitation on quantity of electronics time than anything else – my kids could easily play on electronics ALL DAY and I wanted them to stop and find other things that were positive that they could do.
I’ve actually really liked this rule for our family. I like that I’m not saying NO electronics or friends, just that they need to first focus on church things. We’ve also for a long time had the rule that they can play with friends if those friends are already outside on Sunday but they cannot knock on doors and lure friends out. I didn’t want my kids interfering with other families’ sabbath day observation. I’d always felt like this was a really dumb rule until I was sitting with a group of moms in my neighborhood and discovered that most of them had a similar rule in place- great mom minds think alike!
I still will frequently nap after church but I don’t have the same level of exhaustion that I would come home from church with. I don’t know how much of that was just a Pavlovian response to coming home from church. However, my Sunday naps are really just a tool for me to catch up on sleep from the week so you wouldn’t think that attending church would affect it either way. I like going to bed at the same time as my husband even though he stays up later than I should and gets to sleep in at least an extra hour every morning than I do and I’m the one who is up with the 2yo in the middle of the night. The cumulative sleep deficit between us by Sunday is at least 7 hours – so that nap is a good way to reset to be ready for the week. However my favorite thing to do is to institute “Early Bedtime Sunday” where in lieu of taking a nap I go to bed at like 9pm (instead of 12am-2am) and consider that my “nap”… and let it roll into a full night’s sleep. For awhile I’d convinced my kids that Early Bedtime Sunday was an exciting thing but they don’t buy it anymore 😛
Sunday evenings and dinners haven’t really changed that much. However we have more frequently done virtual family activities like JackBox games with our extended family.
Things I’ve Learned
Obviously in a lot of ways our Sundays haven’t been all that different either before or after the lockdowns. Our desire to avoid commercial activity has remained the same, trying to make it a family day has been the same and our focus on the Savior has been the same. However the ways it has been different has been enlightening to me and I thought I would share some of the things that have stuck in my mind.
Sabbath Attire
The most interesting thing to me has been to see how I personally have treated getting dressed for Sunday services. Since I was a little girl General Conference has been my FAVORITE because we could wear our pajamas to church! I’m not one for loving to get dressed up all the time so you would think that home church during lockdown would have been the perfect opportunity to just stay happy in my PJs while feasting on the word of God. However, I have put on a dress for church every single Sunday of the lockdown. Before lockdown I would probably have told you that I dress up for church mostly because of societal expectations, wanting to conform etc. However I recognized that just that small shift of what I was wearing changed my mindset towards feelings of reverence and respect. My attire may just be an outward symbol but it means something to me about the respect with which I approach the day.
My kids watching conference together, aren’t they the cutest?
However I also realized that this won’t change how I approach General Conference. Even though by all accounts General Conference should inspire even greater reverence, I approach General Conference the way that I would approach a movie marathon. Ten hours of soaking up the words of the apostles and prophets calls for stretchy pants and snacks! I know it sounds backwards, but attending those meetings in my pajamas is part of how I show respect for them. The pajamas are part of the feeling of conference for me – cozy, at home, wrapped in the word of God – when I get dressed up it feels like any other Sunday. Obviously for the times I’ve been able to attend conference in person I’ve done everything to be dressed appropriately for the venue. However, at home I need to be in pajamas, with my laptop, a blanket and something yummy to munch on so that I can be fully engrossed in the learning at hand.
Reverence
It’s also been interesting to see that my focus during church time for my kids shifted from reverence via silence to reverence via participation. In sacrament meeting with so many people meeting together it was most important that my kids weren’t distracting others. Bring on the fruit snacks and coloring books! In a virtual meeting I can mute our family easily so that I’m less concerned about their volume and more concerned that they’re getting something out of the meeting. It’s caused me to reflect on what things I bring to church for my kids – are they meant to help them focus or keep them distracted? And how can I balance the two needs? Obviously my kids need to not disrupt the quiet of the meetings, but how can I instill in them a desire to be attentive and not just tuned out?
The Individual Nature of the Sacrament & Atonement
In a typical sacrament meeting the ordinance is performed for the masses – a whole congregation with probably 200+ people in attendance. While I still take the sacrament individually the prayers are said just once and the distribution happens on a large scale. However one week while we were in lockdown my husband and I were on a getaway by ourselves in a hotel room. We partook of the sacrament and when he said the blessing on the bread and on the water it was just for the two of us. It really felt like the sacrament was being done just for me. The sacrifice of our Savior felt so intimate and personal. Yes, He died for everyone, but He also died for ME. He took upon Himself the pains and sins and struggles of ME. He cares about our whole ward, but He also cares about my little 6 person family. The production value of our at home sacrament service with muffin tins and Ikea cups might not be the highest, but the personal connection between the Atonement and me has never been stronger.
Gratitude for the Priesthood
On the topic of partaking the sacrament at home – I have never been more grateful to be married to a faithful priesthood holder. As the lockdowns started I watched several of my friends of other Christian faiths lament the loss of the opportunity to receive communion. I don’t think there has been a single week since the beginning of the lockdown that I haven’t been able to renew my baptismal covenants with my Heavenly Father. In fact, I have probably missed the sacrament LESS during lockdown than before because it was impossible to be late for the sacrament when my family would wait for me to start. I am so grateful to be a member of the Church where priesthood power is not reserved only for a few but is shared freely with every worthy man who is willing to live righteously and serve others.
It has also made me very grateful for a church with no paid clergy. Certainly ministers in other churches do not go into the profession for the money, but I’ve been especially grateful that my church leaders weren’t motivated to push boundaries and pressure people to come to meetings because their livelihood was jeopardized otherwise. This has given me great confidence as things have slowly been restarted that the decisions are being made solely for the interest of the congregants and not influenced by the amount of money in the collection tray. That’s not meant as a jab at ministers and priests in other churches – goodness knows I’ve watched so much of the pro bono service in my own congregations and thought “so-and-so deserves a salary!” It’s just been interesting to see other churches scramble to find ways to get back together while watching members of my own church take a step back and a deep breath, then redirect their efforts towards personal ministries rather than pushing to get back to the church building.
Church as a Social Activity
The final thing that has been an interesting discovery for me is how much attending church – with the exception of the actual ordinance of the sacrament – for me is really a social activity more than anything else. A few months into the lockdowns our ward began sacrament meetings again that are shorter, physically spaced out within the chapel and require masks. We were permitted to attend every other week based on which half of the alphabet our last name was in. Our family attended the first week we were able to go but after that decided that we were better fulfilled by partaking of the sacrament in our home. The value for us of being IN church is the other people! It’s the opportunity to talk with other people about their struggles and share our burdens and work together. It’s the chance to smile at someone, give them a hug, and see how they’re doing. The talks in sacrament meeting are great, but I have every general conference talk for 40+ years that I can listen to online in addition to podcasts, scriptures, books… I don’t need to attend sacrament meeting to enhance my gospel study. But I need church for the support and structure that it gives to me and my family.
I think before this experience I would have been totally affronted by someone suggesting that church was a social experience rather than a spiritual one. However now I understand it differently. The social aspect IS the spiritual aspect. We attend church to renew our covenants, but that can happen in 10 minutes. We could administer the sacrament through a drive-thru and it would have the same effect. But church gives us the opportunity to LIVE those covenants. We can mourn with those that mourn and comfort those who stand in need of comfort. Church is where we are given the chance to lift the hands that hang down and strengthen the feeble knees. Church lets us not only hear the word of God but help teach it to one another in our classes. Plus, it gives other people the opportunity to do the same for us. I read a quote once that said that the people around us are the portion of humanity God has given us to love. While certainly we ought to reach our circle of love beyond those who share our faith, I do believe that God gives us these church organizations to assign us some particular people who are especially in need of the love we have to offer.
Conclusion
In the end I’m grateful for the opportunity that I’ve had these last few months to reexamine how I approach the Sabbath. I will really miss our lockdown church services and avoiding the Sunday scramble. I hope that there’s some way to preserve some of what we’ve had while church hasn’t been in session. I will definitely miss this special experience that we’ve had in the midst of all of the turmoil in the world right now. It’s neat to see the blessings and the ways the Lord reaches out to us, even in the darkest of times.
A few years back my mom was in some sort of regional church meeting with one of our worldwide church leaders (neither she or I can remember what the meeting was exactly or who the leader was – sorry for the vaguest context ever). The leader was taking questions from the audience and one woman asked him something to the effect of was it ok to delay having children until they had financial stability. The leader told the congregation – “You don’t have babies with money, you have babies with faith.”
That quote has stuck with me a long time. I think there are a lot of times when we feel as parents and in so many other situations that we don’t meet the basic qualifications. Whether from a standpoint of finances, spirituality, emotional wellness, education, age, time or any number of other factors in our life – it’s easy to feel like we should be more prepared before diving in. But the truth is, we are never fully prepared for the things we face in life.
We weren’t meant to have all of the answers before we start out – we’re meant to show up with faith and willingness to work and find the answers along the way. No one is ever really ready to have kids, or get married, or go off to school on their own, or go on a mission, or make a change in their career. You can’t have enough money, experience, education etc to be ready to take on any of these major challenges. Certainly none of these things ought to be taken on recklessly, but there will never be a time when you’re truly ready. Not being perfectly prepared should not stop us from doing the things we were meant to do. The Lord will help us as we have faith. If we show up with our woefully inadequate loaves and fishes He will work miracles with us to accomplish whatever we have before us.
My original tracker is still up and running and updated to reflect current budget amounts as of 29 July 2020, if you’d prefer to use that one, or want to understand more about My Tech High and the history of this tracker click here.
UPDATE 11-11-2020: I’ve added support to select the full year program or half year program which will adjust all of your budgets based on whether you’re starting in August or January. By default it will assume the full year program but make sure you select the half year program if you’re starting in January so that you don’t have your budgets doubled in the spreadsheet!
I have been maintaining this tracker for a couple years now and I’ve been so happy to see it help so many people! This year as My Tech High announced funding increases for their students I decided it was time to update my reimbursement tracker too. I started by just updating the formulas to reflect the new amounts. I tried to convince myself I was done then… but then I spent a week totally revamping the whole process and basically rebuilding the whole thing. So let me tell you what’s new and how to use it 🙂
New Features
Multiple Students in One Workbook: This was by far and away the biggest add. You can now manage the schedules and budgets for all of your students in one workbook (assuming you have less than 20 students, if you have more than 20 students then I really hope you have better organization skills than I do and heaven bless you!)
Budgets Categorized by Class instead of Budget Block: Maybe no one else ran into this but it would bother me all the time. In my old workbook all expenses were matched up with their budget block. So if you had a combined custom core for Math/English/Science that was one category. This was fine unless you changed your Science class from being custom built to being 3rd party. Then you’d have to go in and change all of your expenses to be associated either with this new 3rd party science class or with the new “Custom Core – Math, English” category. Now you simply select the subject the expense is associated with and it will follow that subject into whatever bucket you have it in at the time.
Custom Formatting: This may not have been the most important, but it was the most satisfying part of the process! I’ve changed the font to be a little prettier, added lots of color coding and generally made the whole thing more visually pleasing.
So let’s jump in to how to use it. If you don’t want to read through all of this I’ve made a little video tutorial that you can watch that shows you all of the steps.
The first thing you need to do is make a COPY of my spreadsheet. I frequently get edit requests for the master spreadsheet from people who miss that step, and then you have to wait until I see the email and respond to it… and I will tell you to make a copy 😛 So save yourself some time and don’t skip that step! Ok, here’s the link to the Google Sheet- MTH Reimbursement Tracker 2.0. Let’s start with how to make your own copy. To do this you go to File->Make a copy…
After you do that a box will pop up asking for a name for this document. I usually name it something like “MTH [school year] so that I don’t my workbooks mixed up in future years.
Once you click OK your copy will pop up and you’re ready to begin filling it out. I’ve tried to lock as many of the ranges that you shouldn’t be changing as possible so you don’t accidentally mess up something that you won’t be able to fix, so if you get a warning box saying not to change something – please try to heed it! The first thing you will need to do is select if your children are participating in the full year or half year program. If you’re starting (or already started) in September pick full year, if you’re starting in January pick half year. This will adjust your budget amounts to be either the full amounts or halved amounts depending on when you started the program.
The first thing you will do is enter your students’ names and grades in the Students sheet. You can also pick a color for each student which will just make the rest of the workbook prettier – and making it pretty is what’s most important right? Once you’ve done that go to the bottom of the page and click the “Schedules” worksheet.
You will see that your students’ names have already been populated and options corresponding to your students’ grades will show up. I like to go to the bottom and hide all of the schedules that are for non-existent students – just to make the experience a little bit cleaner for myself. To do this simply select the first row of empty schedules and then select all the way down to the last row. Then right click and you will see the option to “hide rows”, click that and all the extra schedules to disappear.
In the first column the only selection you need to make is whether your student is doing History or Science this year. Don’t change anything in the 2nd column. In the 3rd column you will select whether the classes are going to be custom built, 3rd party or My Tech High Direct. You will notice that as you change these selections that the funds in the second column change to correspond with the budgets you will receive from My Tech High. The 4th column is optional but it gives you a space to write out your course descriptions. You can use this as a place to take notes of things you want to do or to write out your official course descriptions that you will submit to My Tech High. If you use it for writing your official descriptions you might notice that in the last column there is a character counter. It will tell you how many characters you have left before you exceed the course description character limit in InfoCenter. You’re welcome to write more characters in the worksheet, no one will see this other than you. Ok you’ve finished the hard part now on to where the magic happens! Open up the budgets worksheet and we’ll continue on 🙂
On the right it shows a budget breakdown for each of your students. At the top it tells you how much money you have remaining to spend. You will not need to make any changes to these columns because everything will be calculated automatically. Here’s what my kids’ budgets look like right now. You can see that I’m over budget for Sam in a couple of categories but it doesn’t take those negative amounts away from the total available to spend because you can’t spend over the limit for any particular category.
Let’s go on to the purchase list. Here you will simply enter in the items you have purchased, the price paid and then select the student and subject the purchase is associated with. As you do that you will notice that all of the “remaining” balances will update to show you how much is left in each category. If you select a subject with a student that doesn’t have that subject on their schedule the item will turn red and you’ll get an error message off to the side so that you can make sure to put that expense with a valid student/subject combination. Ok one last worksheet to go! Go ahead and click on the “Reimbursement Cover Sheet”
You won’t need the reimbursement cover sheet until it’s time to submit your receipts but I find this to be really handy. At the top of the page you can select a student and a budget and then the rest of the workbook populates with all of the purchases for that period. I will print this page to a PDF and then use it to help me make sure I have all of my receipts together before submitting them at reimbursement time. I use the free program PDFBinder and put the cover sheet first and then add all of the receipts in the order they’re listed on my cover sheet. This makes it easy for MyTechHigh to see at a glance what all of my expenses were and help me get reimbursed faster. Once you’ve already made one submission and you need to make another then if you go back to the Budgets worksheet and check off the “Submitted?” boxes on the expenses that you’ve already been reimbursed for, then when you go back to the Cover Sheet worksheet you’ll see that it only displays the receipts that you haven’t yet been reimbursed for. So that can be handy for helping you keep organized.
One last tip for anyone who considers themselves lightly advanced. If you want to sort your purchases – Select all of the purchase list cells by clicking on the “Item Purchased” cell and dragging your mouse until you are down to the submitted column on your last row. Then go to the “Data” menu and select “Sort range”.
Check the “Data has a header row” box and then you can sort things however you like. I usually like to sort by student, then by subject and then by cost high to low. The sorting won’t stay as you enter in more items, but I find this to be handy as I’m trying to keep organized – especially when I’m getting ready to submit.
And that’s it! Hopefully this helps you to better keep track of your MyTechHigh expenses and budget in the coming years! If you notice anything that I’ve missed please comment below so that I can get it fixed! If this is useful to you consider making a donation to my site, or making a purchase through one of my affiliate links to help me keep this site going. If you’re looking for more ideas on what curriculum you want to use check out my curriculum recommendations post or if you’re looking for ideas on how to schedule your day check out my homeschool scheduling post. Happy Homeschooling 🙂
Side note: Everything above shows actual items I’ve been reimbursed for and course descriptions I’ve had approved. Feel free to use the descriptions and purchase list for inspiration for your own child’s schedule. Just a quick plug for a couple of things we’ve especially loved –
Kiwi Crates – these have been SO much fun for all of my kids and they’ve learned a ton from them. I’ve gotten 1 subscription and made my three kids share it and it’s been great. I thought I was going to like the Kiwi Crate but it’s been so much better than I’d expected. If you use my referral link you get $10 off of your subscription 🙂
Tuttle Twins these books are AMAZING at teaching your kids about the role of government and how laws work. They are definitely from a libertarian perspective and they’re very engaging – I’ve even had lots to think about and discuss after reading them! As of the time of this writing promo code FORTY works to get you 40% off of the retail price.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with My Tech High other than as a parent to students within the program. This tracker is provided free of charge and without warranty. I intend to keep all formulas and information current and accurate however I accept no liability for any faults in the program. Use at your own risk.
Sorry this isn’t going to be a happy post but I needed somewhere to put these feelings. I’m just feeling really sad right now. We got accepted today back into the homeschool charter we’ve been with for the last 4 years – yay! But now that I got that official acceptance I had to officially withdraw from the school my kids were planning to go to this year. We were all SO excited about this school year because this new school had so many really awesome programs. They would let us keep homeschooling using pretty much whatever curriculum we wanted, but with 1 day a week with the kids going to school and getting to be with friends, another half day a week of a real world adventures and planned field trips. I was going to have 1 day a week at home with just my 2 year old! The kids have been so excited, especially my 11 year old who has really struggled since the start of COVID as his friends have outgrown him a little bit and he doesn’t have great outlets to go make new ones. This school year was going to be awesome!
… But then the new plans came out for the year. The half day adventures and the field trips have been cancelled for the year. The on campus days were all going to be totally socially distanced (wearing masks, 6 feet apart from the other kids all day long – the right call for the situation at hand, but it sounded like the most miserable way to spend a day). While we were considering all of that our previous charter school announced changes to their funding that basically opened up an extra $1200 in reimbursement for educational supplies for our family… which pushed us over the edge. It wasn’t necessarily that extra amount in and of itself, but it gave us enough pause to *really* look at the two options side by side and see what the trade offs were with circumstances as they are. When we really considered it we knew we had to withdraw from the new school and go back to our old school.
I feel like it’s a little hard to be sad about something like this though. We are SO blessed! I’m not being pushed into homeschooling against my will. I actually feel so comfortable homeschooling and have been able to help some other families get their bearings in unfamiliar territory. We’ve all been healthy. We have a safe place to live, steady employment, family that we love. We have amazing technology to keep us connected and great support systems that we can reach out to. I’ve been grateful to live in a state that has allowed us quite a bit of freedom while giving strong guidelines and leadership to curb the spread of this disease. (I know I have friends who will disagree with this on both sides, but I’m still grateful and that disagreement isn’t the point of this post, pick another post for that battle 😉 ) I have a great yard, a house with lots of diversions, friends to connect with, family to visit with, technology savvy to get through all this… but I’m still sad.
In a parenting book I read recently it emphasized the importance of recognizing your child’s feelings and not brushing them off or putting them down. The guidance was to accept them, name them and validate them. I think it’s important for us to do this with ourselves too even as adults. I’m not saying to dwell on negatives and put yourself in a downward spiral. However, I think there’s importance in recognizing and saying “I’m sad and this is hard.”
It’s been almost funny the things through this pandemic that have gotten me to small breaking points. Back in April I was putting together snack bags for my kids for general conference. I wasn’t able to go out to the store and as I was putting their bags together I realized I didn’t have Capri Suns. I never have Capri Suns, but it’s something that I usually will get special just for General Conference. It was the dumbest thing to be upset about, but in the moment that was super hard for me. It wasn’t really about the Capri Suns, but it represented that I didn’t have the ability to give my kids the things I wanted to be able to give them. Stability, safety, fun – it was a mark of my lack of control in the world and it was a really hard realization. (Don’t worry, we had a miracle of the loaves and fishes and I was able to cobble together snack bags from things I didn’t even know I had and some random drink mixes took the place of the Capri Suns in the end – my kids didn’t even know they were missing)
That’s sort of how I’m feeling now. What I wanted to be able to give to my kids – and thought I *would* be able to give to my kids – has been taken away. It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s lots of things out of anyone’s control. It’s just hard. We have other great options, but I’m still sad about it. I will be ok. I can see all the bright sides of what we can do instead and it really is going to be fine. But I’m still sad, and it’s ok to be sad. It doesn’t have to be the biggest thing to be sad about. Being sad is not a contest. It’s ok if you’re sad over something big and I’m sad over something small. We’re still both allowed to be sad and my sadness doesn’t diminish your sadness, nor does your sadness negate mine. They’re just the feelings we have and we’re allowed to have them.
I just thought I should post this because I’m sure I’m not the only one feeling this way. This is hard. It is ALL hard. Regardless of who you are or where you’re at I’m sure there are things that you’ve lost in this pandemic – whether it’s loved ones, or trips, or school choices, or a feeling of safety, or even just some Capri Suns. It’s hard. It’s ok to feel like it’s hard. It’s ok to be sad about those things that you’ve lost – whether they’re big things or little things. It’s ok to be sad about the little things too. We will get through this, and I believe we will all be better and stronger for it. But right now, it’s ok to recognize your sadness, your sense of loss, and give it its proper place before you let it go. {Hugs} to all of you out there in whatever hard things you’re facing. I believe in you, you can make it ?
When I started this post series it was under the assumption that most students would be back in their regular classrooms within a couple of weeks. However, as things are progressing it’s seeming more likely that families are going to need more long term educational solutions than just a couple of weeks. With that in mind I thought I would chime in with some of my curriculum recommendations.
There are more different curriculum choices out there than you can even imagine and the process of deciding on a curriculum from scratch can be truly daunting. However, as most parents that are diving in right now aren’t necessarily looking for super long term solutions (just a couple of months rather than a full educational career) I thought I might chime in with some ideas for curriculum that is easily adaptable without too much hassle.
Most of my kids’ schoolwork is completed online which means that I am not actually the one teaching them. I know lots of parents have different feelings on using technology with kids. For me, this is a critical element of any curriculum that we use – that my kids can largely go through the work with little intervention on my part. Especially as many parents are working from home now while trying to get their kids through their schoolwork this seems extra critical. I will look over my kids’ schoolwork but the only actual teaching I do in a typical day is to do a 15 minute reading lesson with my kindergartner and once a week I will facilitate science and social studies – and none of those require any real prep on my part. I might work out problems on the whiteboard with my 3rd grader, or help my 5th grader through his grammar lesson – but I don’t actually prepare lessons or teach. While my older kids are working on school work I can mostly work on other household tasks, or entertain the 2 year old.
I’m also personally opposed to curriculum that has a lot of worksheets. Our first year of homeschooling we used K12.com which is a public-school-at-home curriculum – all free, and the actual curriculum was pretty good – but it was SO many worksheets. It killed my 1st grader’s love of learning and it was at least a year before I could even mention the idea of a worksheet without him melting into a puddle in a PTSD tantrum. I’ve heard the same from many others who have used K12. I will use worksheets but I’m very particular about the ones I use – it can’t just be to keep someone busy, it needs to have a really good purpose behind it.
Our Curriculum Picks
I use different curriculum for different subjects. I will break down below how I cover each different subject in our homeschool, as well as some resources that I’ve used in the past or ones that I’ve seen highly recommended. If you’re just looking for a specific subject I’ll link to the different subjects here –
Easy Peasy is a free, complete homeschooling curriculum. You can go in, print out the assignments, and be off to go. They have workbooks that you can buy, and books that you could purchase if you don’t want to look for them at your local library. I know lots of people who have used their curriculum and love it for being easy to just open and do. It didn’t fit our personal style but I know lots of people love it. And did I mention that it’s FREE? Free is always a best seller 😉
The Good and the Beautiful is not free, but the curriculum is low priced and very modular so it’s not a huge investment like some other curriculum are. I’ve heard so many great things about how well their units integrate many different aspects of learning as well as incorporating a spiritual side of things. Lots of people LOVE it, but again, it didn’t fit our personal style so we haven’t used it ourselves.
Family School Online is FREE through the end of June! This is a faith based curriculum geared towards members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I haven’t used this curriculum before in large part because it’s usually fairly pricey. It is definitely a more hands-on curriculum than I usually go for as well, but the quality is excellent. Everyone who I’ve heard that has used it has been very happy with it!
As far as an all-in-one option that I’ve actually used – Time4Learning. I don’t currently use Time4Learning but I have in the past and I think it’s a great option if you want low effort, complete, online learning. For $19/month for your first student, and $15/month for additional students in your household you cover all of your basics – math, language arts, social studies and science. I wasn’t thrilled with the assessment process – I felt it was too easy for kids to keep progressing through many of the activities without mastering them. I also wasn’t overwhelmingly impressed with their social studies and science curriculum. They were fine, but nowhere near as involved as their reading and math, and not as high of production value. However I haven’t found any other single online curriculum that covers all the bases at such a low price so I felt I needed to start with that recommendation.
Math
We have used so many different Math curriculum through the years. Currently each of my kids each use a different math curriculum so I’ll try to break down those three, plus a great free option.
Khan Academy – Let’s start with the biggest selling feature – Khan Academy is FREE! I also really like their learning model. Khan Academy is all mastery-based learning. To move on you have to really prove that you understand the material. It’s easy to move at your own pace and the videos do a great job of explaining the material – albeit in a bit of a dry manner. Khan Academy also offers other classes in many subjects (all still free), but I’ve only used their math courses personally. Their math curriculum includes representation of same gender relationships. I’ve found that their courses can be a little bit difficult for kids to navigate and they’re not really easy to work with if you have a struggling reader. I actually like using Khan Academy for myself because it’s a great way for me to brush up on my math skills without much investment or time. One day I hope to make it to higher levels of math than I completed in school, but with 4 littles running around… it hasn’t made my top priority 😉
Beast Academy – This is my current favorite curriculum for Math! It costs $15/month for your first student and $7.50 for additional students – but there are discounts if you pay annually rather than monthly. Also right now they have a coupon code for $15 off a new subscription (i.e. a free month if you’re paying monthly!) – FLATTENTHECURVE. The program is set up with comic books that explain the concepts as well as short, engaging video lectures. I like this curriculum because it does a great job of teaching logic as well as math. It includes lots of great problem solving skills which I think is awesome for kids to learn. This is what my 11 year old is currently using and he’s loving it! My 3rd grader was too set in the curriculum he was using and wouldn’t really give this one a fair shake, but I think if I were starting him fresh this is what I would put him in too. It’s a little higher level though than my kindergartner is ready for – it’s geared for ages 8-12. They have a partner curriculum – Art of Problem Solving – that’s for grades 5-12. So if you have a student that’s grades 3-12 this is where I would start!
Teaching Textbooks – This is the curriculum my 8 year old prefers. It’s super straightforward – a short video lecture, a few practice problems and then 22 problems per lesson. There are quizzes sprinkled throughout. It’s not quite as “fun” as Beast Academy but it’s very clear and not dry. You have to purchase this curriculum by the level rather than having access to the whole curriculum for a subscription fee, but it’s only about $43/year for the lower levels up to $67/year for pre-calculus – so on a monthly basis you’re only looking at between $4-6/month which is a pretty good deal. They also offer FREE access to the first 15 lessons of any level, so you have a good chance to try it out before committing. Teaching Textbooks is taught on a spiral method – which means that they keep coming back to earlier concepts if you didn’t get them the first time which I really like. They also have the clearest grading system and the ability to reassign different work for your kids which I think is helpful. Their style is definitely the closest to a traditional school setting for better or worse – I don’t think it’s the most innovative, but it’s clear and easy to use. My 8 year old loves that he knows exactly what will be required of him. I have him go through the lecture and the problems on his own. When he’s done I will review with him any problems that he got wrong and we will discuss them. When he finishes a full level I save a copy of his gradebook and then I go through and delete all of the problems he got wrong (this takes forever because it’s a super manual process). Then I make him spend a few days going over each of the problems he got wrong until he gets them ALL right. That may sound like cheating, but I’m more interested in him learning all of the material before moving on than any grading system.
MathSeeds – If you have a student that’s K-2 this is my favorite curriculum for them. It is also paired with their ReadingEggs curriculum which I’ll talk about below. They offer a free trial but a subscription is only $59/year – or less if you hold out and wait for good coupon codes (they’ll start emailing them to you when your subscription expires) plus you can get even more money back if you use Honey. The activities are fun and easy to do. It’s all approached as a game so if you’re sneaky about it you might even be able to convince your kids that it’s not work at all 😉 I like that it won’t let your child move on until they master an activity – however sometimes my kindergartner gets frustrated when she’s stuck on an activity. I find that if I keep an eye on her we can get through things together though when she gets frustrated. The reporting isn’t as complete as I would like and it’s not as easy to send a kid back for a single concept or lesson, but for the age level and the price, I think it’s fantastic and I would highly recommend it.
Language Arts
Language Arts covers Reading Comprehension, Handwriting, and Language Mechanics. For my kids my goal is that we’re making progress in each of those three categories and I design their assignments to cover those categories. Language Mechanics covers a few different disciplines and in my mind the progression roughly goes Phonics -> Spelling -> Grammar -> Composition – but there’s a lot of overlap. I don’t really have a full curriculum that I follow for each of these but I will explain what I do to cover these subjects.
Reading Comprehension
This is probably the easiest one – READ! If your kids can’t yet read on their own, then read to them. If they can read provide them with great reading material and let them loose 🙂 I’m not very structured in how we do reading. I don’t assign particular books, there’s no worksheets or quizzes – I just want them reading and enjoying it. My oldest can’t be kept from reading so he has no requirements set on him. I have set him up with a GoodReads account and ask him to review his books and track them there. My 2nd son struggles with reading so I have him set a timer each day and he’s expected to read for 30 minutes – lately he’s been enjoying his dad’s old Boxcar Children books and the Magic Treehouse series. My kindergartner listens to a lot of audiobooks. I try to discuss books with my kids and we’ve set up a small book club with some other families so the kids can discuss their books with other kids – but that’s really it.
I have an Audible account and each of my children have an Echo Dot in their room. They all listen to books as they go to sleep at night, and sometimes throughout the day as they’re doing chores. My oldest has a Kindle Paperwhite and it is his most prized possession – we check out lots of digital books from the library and I’ve purchased him a lot of books with Prime shipping credits and off of sales through the years. We check out lots of books from the library and I buy books all the time. Reading is hardly considered a chore in our house, I feel like my job is to facilitate a love of reading and learning.
Handwriting
Handwriting Without Tears has been my favorite handwriting curriculum. I should follow it more closely than I do but I’ve mostly just had my kids fill out their workbooks. I set a timer for 15 minutes and expect them to work through whatever they get through in that time. I like making handwriting a timed thing rather than a completion thing because it doesn’t incentivize them to rush through and do sloppy work – if they get through 1 page or 25 pages they still have to write for 15 minutes, so they might as well do a good job 😉
Right now none of my kids are actually actively using their HWOT materials. My 11yo combines his handwriting practice with his grammar curriculum which I’ll talk about below. My 8yo is assigned to write a journal entry every day. His entries are to have the following things in them –
The date written out long hand (i.e. Thursday, March 19, 2020)
A brief report on the weather (he’s been struggling with associating months and seasons so this is his practice for that)
His 5 spelling words
A paragraph of free write that must be at least 30 words long (I have to be really specific with him so he doesn’t try to pass off crap work with me 😛 )
His full name written out
My kindergartner has very simple handwriting worksheets that I printed out for her. I googled “kindergarten handwriting worksheets” and I’ve printed different ones from different sources. She would probably be better off doing the HWOT workbooks, but this is working for us right now.
Language Mechanics
Reading Eggs is my favorite online tool for teaching language mechanics. It goes from preschool through about 6th grade and it has great phonics, spelling and grammar. It’s combined with the MathSeeds curriculum that I mentioned in the Math section, and it’s only $60 or less per year for the two programs which is a fantastic price! Plus you can add on extra students for even less. Right now only my kindergartner uses this, but I’ve used it with all of my kids in the past and I would use it again. The only reason my 8yo isn’t using it right now is that he gave me too much push back and I surrendered and got him Reading Kingdom instead. Reading Kingdom is $15/month and does not include a math curriculum (I’m realizing while writing this what a ding dong my 8yo is and how much extra his stubbornness is costing us in different curriculum… we might be having words 😛 ) but my son is making really great strides in his reading so it’s probably been worth it.
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons is one of my favorite resources if you have a child just beginning to learn to read. It’s only about $15 off of Amazon and it is SO easy to use. I recommend reading through the introduction before starting as it explains a lot of the methodology – but once you do that it is a no-prep reading lesson that is very effective! The lessons take about 15 minutes to get through and they’re really easy. I found though that sometimes the lessons get too hard suddenly. When we get to a point where we’re struggling too much with the lessons I will sometimes go back 5 or 10 lessons (or sometimes back to the beginning) and re-do the lessons we’ve already completed to build confidence and get more practice before moving on. You don’t need any other supplies to use this curriculum and it’s a one time purchase that you can use with multiple children. However I purchased these pointer fingers because reading is much more fun with ridiculously oversized pointer fingers 😛
Fix It Grammar has been great for my 11yo for working on his grammar and handwriting. At the beginning of the week we introduce a new concept that he will be working on for the week. Then each day he has a sentence that he’s supposed to correct using that new concept and each of the concepts from the previous units. Then he rewrites the sentence to practice his handwriting. At the end of the week he takes all 4 sentences and rewrites them into a clean copy. The sentences all connect together to make a story that goes through the whole book – so it’s fun each week to get a new part of the story.
Social Studies
The Tuttle Twins books have been my favorite resource for teaching civics/government/economics to my kids. Their books are fun to read and easy to understand. I have learned so much from them and my kids have impressed many people with the complex concepts that they’re able to discuss. Each week we will pick one of the books, read it, discuss it and then maybe do a couple pages from the workbook. They’re super easy lessons and they’re great! Right now you can get 35% off their combo pack with discount code COMBO – which includes all of their current books in the series as well as the pdf workboks. I’ve also purchased the audiobooks so that I don’t even have to be the one *reading* to my kids (I’m a pretty lazy homeschooler 😛 ). They also have a great economics curriculum that’s on sale right now for only $5/month – they will email you a new unit study each week which has a short lesson, activities and discussion questions. I’ve been doing this with our kids and I’ve been very impressed with them. I would probably start with the books to set a really good foundation before moving on to their Free Market Rules curriculum.
Story of the World is a really great history curriculum for kids. I like it because it ties in many different cultures and histories together. I also like that you start at the beginning and work your way through to modern times so everything feels continuous instead of chopped up. Again with these books I’ve purchased the audiobooks and I’ll have my kids listen to a chapter and then we’ll do a worksheet from the workbook and discuss. No prep beyond printing out the worksheets. There are other books that are recommended that you can purchase or check out from the library to enrich the study, but the books are pretty great as standalone material.
Both of these I think are great for all levels. I will have all 3 of my older kids – kindergarten – 5th grade – working through the curriculum and discussing it together. They all get different things out of it but there’s appropriate content for each different level.
Science
Kiwi Crates have been one of our favorite ways to do science. Each kit comes with reading material, lots of expansion activities and a few building projects. I have purchased a single subscription for my kids and we have fun building the kits together. I’ve been impressed with how much they pack into each kit and my kids have learned a lot. I can stretch a kit out over a full month if we do all of the activities but we have a lot of other places we go for science as well.
Mystery Science has a lot of great “open-and-go” science lessons. They have a limited number of free accounts that they give away each year, but even if you miss those it’s only $70/year for your whole household. We have a subscription but haven’t used it as much as we should – only because we cut off access to YouTube on my kids’ computers which made the site unusable 😛 But the lessons that I’ve done through there have really been great. I really need to get my kids back into Mystery Science!
We watch a lot of YouTube science videos and other science videos. I mentioned these in my first post but they’re worth repeating here –
Mark Rober – I can’t say enough good things about Mark Rober’s channel. He is by far and away my favorite YouTuber, everything he publishes is high quality and teaches complicated concepts in ways that make them seem simple.
Wow In The World – This podcast is SO much fun for kids! My almost 9 year old (he won’t accept being called 8 anymore) LOVES this show so much – he insists on listening to it almost every night and talks to me about what he learns all the time.
DIY Sci – Steve Spangler has long been a staple in the children’s science world. If you have Amazon Prime I highly recommend this series as well. My kids have learned so much from this and I’m always interested to hear what’s in their brains after watching these episodes!
Magic School Bus – If you didn’t watch Magic School Bus growing up I’m sad for you. These shows are fun, engaging and they teach kids a lot! The series is available on Netflix – along with a new remade series which I find every bit as enjoyable as the originals!
Smarter Every Day – Another great YouTube channel with lots of interesting things for kids – and adults too!
I feel like science is the easiest subject to get in. Kids are naturally curious and love learning about the world around them. Of course, my mom is a scientist so maybe I just inherited her love of science 😉
Technology
Technology can cover a huge range of things but I’ll limit my suggestions here to some of my favorite computers & programming curriculum as well as one more hands on product. I should note that I have worked as a computer programmer since 2004 so I have a little bit of experience in this area 😉
Kids Typing Bundle – if your kids are learning to type I think this is the way to go. You get two different programs for about $25 total, and you have access to them for all of your kids forever! The programs that are in the bundle are both fun and easy to use. There are free programs out there but I’ve never found anything that my kids have liked as much.
Tynker – if your kids are ready to get into programming I think Tynker is a great place to start. They teach programming and a lot of the courses are based around programs that kids already love like Minecraft! My kids have loved these courses. Plus, right now they’re offering FREE access during all of the school closures so you really don’t have anything to lose by trying them out!
CodeCombat is my favorite resource for teaching serious programming. It’s a game that kids play by programming their character to do different things. It’s free for the first couple of worlds – which is actually quite a lot of material before you’d need to pay. The game does involve swords and killing monsters so if that bothers you then this won’t be for you. None of the game play is graphic at all though so it’s not something that bothers me personally.
Snap Circuits are great if you’re looking for a more hands-on approach to technology. Their kits have lots of fun projects with electricity and building circuits. These are a great place to start if your kid has any interest in robotics or electricity. My kids have really had fun with their snap circuits kit!
Music
My kids have been enrolled in music lessons that are in person which obviously doesn’t work so well during the shutdowns. But I still feel like I need to put in a plug for Let’s Play Music. I’ve enrolled my 8yo and 6yo in their program and it’s been AMAZING. The only reason my 11yo hasn’t gone through the program is that he was too old for it by the time I found it. But my kids have learned so much great musical theory and had so much fun doing it. By the end of the 3 year program my 8yo was able to *compose* his own piano piece and perform it. I can’t say enough good things about their program.
During the shutdown we’re trying out Hoffman Academy which offers free online piano lessons for kids. I’ve heard great things about it from lots of people so we’ll see if those recommendations hold true in the next few weeks.
Art
I wish I could say I had good recommendations for art curriculum… but I don’t. For art we do a lot of coloring sheets or google for art projects. I should come up with something more concrete for art for my kids but it hasn’t been a priority for us.
Social Thinking
Social Thinking isn’t necessarily a subject explicitly covered in schools but I have some kids who struggle with behavior and social interactions. We have purchased the “Social Thinking and Me” book as well as the Thinksheets workbook. We read one chapter from the book together and then over the next several days my son will work through at least one thinksheet each day. When he finishes all of the thinksheets for the unit I will go over his thinksheets and we’ll discuss his answers. I feel like these have been so helpful for us – it helps teach my son and it’s given us all a shared vocabulary to talk about these behavioral problems.
Foreign Language
DuoLingo is a great FREE resource for learning a foreign language. None of my kids are currently actively using it but my 11yo has used it before, we’re just focusing on other things right now. My husband and I both use it though and I’ve been reasonably impressed with it. My dad also uses it and frequently tries to impress us with how many lingots he has (lingots are the in game currency… they aren’t good for much except bragging to other people about how may you have 😛 ). This curriculum also includes representation of same gender relationships. They do have a premium membership that’s you can purchase on a monthly basis if you don’t want to have ads interrupting your learning. I’ve really enjoyed making my foreign language practice a game!
Conclusion
Wow did you stick with me through all of that? Great job! Whatever you choose to do I would generally recommend starting out with the shortest subscription or a starter set of any new curriculum. You’ll notice that I have several recommendations for most subjects – that’s because we’ve changed curriculum several times and chosen different things for different kids. Even within the same family what works for one kid doesn’t work for another – and what works for me might not work for you! Pick one and give it a try for a couple weeks, and if it doesn’t work for you then try something else. You know your kids and you’ll figure it out. You got this!
I’ve been intending for some time to write a post to share some of the things that I’ve learned in my 4 years of homeschooling. Today school was cancelled for the state that I live in for the rest of the month due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Knowing that I have many friends who will now be homeschooling under duress I figured now was the time to share some of my experiences!
For starters let me tell you the most important secret of homeschooling – HOMESCHOOL DOES NOT LOOK LIKE PUBLIC SCHOOL! If you’re dreading spending 6 hours instructing your kids – you’re in luck! If my kids are moving along through their schoolwork like they’re supposed to then we can easily be finished before noon and then they have the rest of the day to themselves. That sounds crazy to most public schoolers, but the truth is that if you don’t have to account for all the time lost with lining up to go places, settling down other kids, waiting for others to finish their schoolwork, travel time, unpacking belongings etc – you make up a lot of time. Plus, all of the instruction can go at the child’s individual pace so they’re never left behind because the concepts were too difficult or bored because they understood the material faster. Being done by noon is one of my kids’ favorite parts of homeschooling. Especially since they know that they have all the power to do it and it’s their choice if they’re finished by then or not. They just know that there’s no electronics time and mom will keep nagging them until all of their tasks are finished. They each have a checklist that they fill out and review with me in order to know if they’re “free” or not each day.
Also, you do NOT have to be the instructor. Most of my kids’ schoolwork is completed online which means that I am not actually the one teaching them. I know lots of parents have different feelings on using technology with kids, but for me, this is a critical element of any curriculum that we use is that my kids can largely go through the work with little intervention on my part. I will look over my kids’ schoolwork but the only actual teaching I do in a typical day is to do a 15 minute reading lesson with my kindergartner and once a week I will facilitate science and social studies activities. I might work out problems on the whiteboard with my 3rd grader, or help my 5th grader through his grammar lesson – but I don’t actually prepare lessons or teach. While my older kids are working on school work I can mostly work on other household tasks, or entertain the 2 year old. I will share some of my favorite resources for curriculum in another post, but just know – it’s not all on you. I think the biggest thing to keep you from going crazy during these couple weeks is to try to set up a reasonable routine. Do what you can but don’t feel like you have to hit every single subject every day. So without further ado, here’s what we try to hit each day –
Morning Chores
Exercise & Meditation
Math
Language Arts
Music Practice
Daily Special Subject (Science, Social Studies, Technology, Art or Music)
Daily Chore
KISS – Keep It Simple Smartie! You don’t need to do any more than this in a day, and if you do less – YOU’RE DOING FINE! I’ll break down below what each of these might look like in a typical day –
Morning Chores – These are super basic things that your kids probably have to do before they go to school anyways – get dressed, brush their teeth, brush their hair, clean up their rooms, make their beds. Easy enough? K, next!
Exercise/Meditation – You can skip this if you want but I think it helps to get some physical activity in before we get started for the day. It gets the blood flowing and their brains working better. All we do is use the free app 7 Minute Workout which runs us through a little routine of jumping jacks, sit ups, push ups etc. Our 2 year old thinks it’s the best thing ever and he wants to “Ex-er-cise with us?” all day long – he’s a nut. Our meditation is nothing fancy, I have my kids sit still for two minutes and focus on taking deep breaths with their eyes closed. When we finish we usually try to have our family prayers before jumping into school work.
Math – I use exclusively online curriculum for Math because I think that’s easiest – the lectures are done for me and computers are unsurprisingly good at grading math problems 😉 My kids’ math usually takes them less than 30 minutes to get through. You can use Khan Academy for free and set your kids up with an account. Just set them a timer for 30 minutes and let them get through as much as they can. I have other curriculum that I like better but for a few weeks of homeschooling I think Khan Academy is probably a great solution. Another great option would be to let your kids play Prodigy – it’s a free math adventure game that my kids love. It’s not a full curriculum but it will keep their math skills up for a few weeks 🙂
Language Arts – I have a few different things that I try to focus on with my kids – grammar exercises, reading and handwriting. I would probably not worry about grammar for these few weeks – there are great curriculum out there but you probably won’t get far enough into one to make it worth the effort. I would just encourage your kids to maybe write a journal entry and spend some time reading whatever they would like to be reading – or listening to books. My 3rd grader’s journaling requirements each day are supposed to have the date written out, a simple weather report, each of his spelling words written out and 3 sentences (with at least 30 words in those sentences) about whatever is in his brain that day. (I had to give him very prescriptive requirements or else he tries to talk his way out of doing anything at all 😛 )
Music Practice – Unless you already have your kids doing a musical instrument or something just go ahead and skip this. This is just when my kids have to do their regular music practice.
Daily Special Subject – We try to hit each of these subjects just one time each week. We do Science on Mondays, Social Studies on Tuesdays, Music lessons on Wednesdays, Technology on Thursdays, Art on Fridays. I probably wouldn’t go that complicated, I’d just do some Science and maybe Social Studies for this limited amount of time. If you want to do something for Social Studies I can’t recommend the Tuttle Twins books enough – read one with your kids and discuss it or do the workbook pages that come with the books. I have learned so much from these books and they are my favorites by far and away. For Science, there are some AWESOME science videos out there that will keep your kids engaged – pick one or more and let your kids watch them and call it a day 🙂 Here’s some of my favorite YouTube Channels and other resources –
Mark Rober – I can’t say enough good things about Mark Rober’s channel. He is by far and away my favorite YouTuber, everything he publishes is high quality and teaches complicated concepts in ways that make them seem simple.
Wow In The World – This podcast is SO much fun for kids! My almost 9 year old (he won’t accept being called 8 anymore) LOVES this show so much – he insists on listening to it almost every night and talks to me about what he learns all the time.
DIY Sci – Steve Spangler has long been a staple in the children’s science world. If you have Amazon Prime I highly recommend this series as well. My kids have learned so much from this and I’m always interested to hear what’s in their brains after watching these episodes!
Magic School Bus – If you didn’t watch Magic School Bus growing up I’m sad for you. These shows are fun, engaging and they teach kids a lot! The series is available on Netflix – along with a new remade series which I find every bit as enjoyable as the originals!
Smarter Every Day – Another great YouTube channel with lots of interesting things for kids – and adults too!
Daily Chore – Each day I have a household chore that my kids are responsible to accomplish. If they’re going to be home have them make your life a little easier! The chores I give my kids are – cleaning laundry, folding laundry, cleaning a bathroom, vacuuming bedroom, & cleaning up the playroom. Just one of those each day and in theory our household runs smoothly ;P
That’s it! In a nutshell you can do a fairly full school day with a quick workout, an online math lesson, some form of reading, a journal entry, a science video and then put your kids to work keeping the house! Then let them have the rest of the day to do legos or board games or building forts. I refuse to entertain my kids and they find plenty of good things to do with their days. I made a simple printable that you can print and laminate and then let your kids check it off each day to keep them accountable.
Several weeks back I was sitting in stake conference when one of the women speaking told a story about taking freezer meals to others. While listening I had the thought that I ought to make freezer meals for my ministering sisters and take it to them for the first day of school. For those of you not familiar with the ministering program – in our church pairs of women are given assignments to watch out for other women in the congregation. We call them ministering sisters and generally each woman in our church has a companion, two sisters she ministers to and two sisters assigned to minister to her. It’s a wonderful way to make sure that every one has someone looking out for their needs and caring for them on a personal level. This freezer meal idea was weird because I felt like I was supposed to do this for the sisters who minister to me and not the ones that I minister to. I tried to brush it off. I thought I was being too suggestible and trying to steal the speaker’s inspiration. Just because that is what this speaker had done didn’t mean it was what I needed to do.
As the meeting went on the thought kept coming back to me, but I kept pushing it off. I tried to think instead about how I could bless the lives of the sisters I minister to, but my mind kept coming up blank. Finally as the last speaker stood up he said that if we’d had any impressions during the meeting that we needed to act on them. His words cut through me. I knew then that I needed to do this so I filed it away.
School starting was still a week and a half off, but I felt like I needed to wait until the first day of school to take these meals. That was a little annoying since for our first day of school we were going to be packing to leave on a family vacation. Also, we homeschool so the first day of school is more of a working day for me than a break. I didn’t really think I had extra time that day. Besides, it was a freezer meal. By definition it shouldn’t matter what day I took it because the whole point was to put it in the freezer and pull it out whenever you needed it. Taking it sooner only meant that it could be helpful sooner as well as later – right? However as I tried to fit it into the week before I couldn’t seem to make it happen. So I ended up pushing it back to the first day of school anyways.
The other weird thing was that I felt distinctly like what I needed to take was Tomato Basil soup. That might not seem too weird, it’s a really yummy soup and not too difficult to make. However it is not something that I had a freezeable recipe for! I’ve made it a lot of times, but it’s not even a crock pot recipe. It’s a recipe that calls for sauteeing and boiling ingredients separately and then blending with a blender before serving. So it didn’t seem like it would be easy to convert for a one step, dump and cook freezer meal. Plus, it’s not the most filling soup it usually requires a sandwich or something to round it out as a meal. It didn’t seem like the greatest all-in-one kind of meal to bring as a freezer meal. I tried to think instead of another heartier recipe that I could easily freeze. I considered making my Chicken Tortilla soup which would have been super easy to put together as a freezer meal – and a much more hearty soup. But every time I thought of it there was an insistent thought that it needed to be Tomato Basil soup. I finally relented and picked up those ingredients.
Finally the first day of school came. It turned out I was able to get a lot of my trip preparations done in the days earlier. I also decided that our first day of school wasn’t going to be academic and we would wait until after our trip to kick off schooling. I surprisingly had time that day. Even still, I was only half convinced that I was actually going to follow through with this. I had promised my kids that we would go get smoothies that morning in honor of their friends starting school and felt like I had other things that needed to be done. However I woke up with the motivation so I told the kids they’d have to wait. In all honesty the whole endeavor seemed doomed. Who makes 8 batches of a recipe in a way they’ve never tested before to give to 5 other families?? But we got it done and in the freezer. I texted my ministering sisters as well as the sisters I minister to and let them know that I had a batch of soup for each of them. Then I headed out with my kiddos to get their first day of school smoothies – despite it being nearly noon.
That afternoon I got a text back from one of my ministering sisters and took her over some soup. I honestly felt so dumb taking over an untested recipe on a day when I was sure families probably had other plans. I almost apologetically handed over the soup feeling like I had done this more for my sake to get the feeling to go away than for hers. When my friend invited me in she told me that their fridge and freezer had gone out and they’d lost all of their cold food over the weekend. They had to wait until the end of the week to get their new fridge and she hadn’t known what she was going to do for dinner that night. The soup came just at the right time so she could have a home cooked meal for her family. I was especially touched to realize that if I had taken the meal the week before (which I’d thought would be more convenient for everyone) then she would have lost it along with the rest of her food. I guess Heavenly Father knew what he was talking about when he said to wait until the first day of school.
Later that afternoon I took a batch to each of the sisters I minister to. I hadn’t felt as compelled to bring them a freezer meal as I had for my own ministering sisters. But I felt like I was doing ministering wrong to take a freezer meal to my ministering sisters and not to the sisters I minister to. So as long as I was making soup they were going to get some too! It was a good excuse to see them and I’m guessing that it was helpful for them to have a meal in the freezer for when they needed it. I felt good about it, however they hadn’t had the same sort of extenuating circumstances that my ministering sister had and I realized that the prompting I had received was right as it was. I was intended to go to my ministering sisters with the soup.
In the evening I was able to take another batch to my other ministering sister. As I’d been preparing the soup I remembered that she’s a vegetarian. My tomato basil soup is one of my only recipes that – if I substitute vegetable broth for chicken broth – is vegetarian. I felt again that I had been guided in what I prepared. We talked for awhile and she told me she was excited to have a home cooked meal as she lives alone and doesn’t do a lot of cooking. I felt glad that I had followed the prompting to make something that she could eat at home that would make her happy. I felt happy to have been able to bless someone in a personal way.
I thought that was the end of the story and honestly I felt like it was more than enough to have been a part of these tiny tender mercies. How cool that the Lord knew what these women needed and had allowed me to take part in it. I finished packing and went on our trip to the Grand Canyon with a full heart.
Later that week I looked at my phone and saw that my second ministering sister had tagged me in a post on Instagram. Curious I signed in and saw that she’d posted that she had just come home from surgery. She posted a picture of the soup all prepared and talked about how having a meal that she could make at home was such a blessing that day so that she didn’t have to go out while she was recovering. You guys – I didn’t even know she was having surgery. But the Lord did. He knew she could really use having something warm and comforting to eat at home that day. He had put in my heart in advance the exact thing that needed to happen so that this woman would have what she needed when she came home.
I felt really humbled by how well the Lord knows us. He knows not only the things we are going through – but the things we *will* go through. He knew to give me enough lead time to psych myself up to make a freezer meal I didn’t know how to make. He knew to hold me off until after my friend’s freezer went out so that the soup wouldn’t go bad with the rest of her food. He knew that I needed to make a meal that was vegetarian. He knew that my ministering sister was going in to surgery and would need something she could eat after the fact. He KNOWS us, and He loves us. He has a plan that is greater for each of us and He is ready to use us to bless the lives of those around us in meaningful ways.
