1. Kroger deals
Some of the deals I picked up this week: a variety of mushrooms for ½ price, 2lb blocks of cheese for $5, and large bags of cereals for $1.79 each.
2. Discovered two new-to-me, free homeschooling websites
This week, we tried out the Khan academy, which is a site full of videos and exercises on a variety of math, history, and science topics. My daughter really liked how the instructor explains the math topics because while I love math, my teaching leaves a lot to be desired. I think we will mostly use this site to introduce a new math topic before we dive into our textbook work for the day. I really love how they have exercises that test the student’s knowledge and they also show you how to correctly do the problems you miss.
The other site was called The Good and the Beautiful. This site is mostly for lower elementary grades and it also is a new company, so they have not released all of the curriculum to the public yet. However, I noticed that the language art workbooks for grades 1-5 are totally free as a download. Since I will have a second grader this fall, I plan to download the language arts workbook for free and then only print off pages that need to be filled out, which will save me paper and time in the long run.
3. Donated books
After cleaning out our bookshelves, I found a lot of children’s books that my daughter had outgrown that needed a new home. I considered trying to sell them, but they were really well-loved, so we decided to give them away at our homeschool co-op instead. (We put them on the free table and they were literally gone in 10 minutes…we are talking close to 100 books)
How is this frugal? Well it opened up bookshelf space for me to add more age appropriate books for my kids, which in turn, helps me to avoid building additional bookshelves for our library (We may have a book problem…)
**More importantly, it was extremely frugal for someone else. It makes me feel wonderful to know that another little girl will get to enjoy these wonderful series. I also expect that their new owners will pass them on when they are done with them, which is what I like to call Frugal-cycling, so everyone wins.
4. Used leftovers wisely
Food waste is my arch nemesis! Whenever I can find ways to use up all of my leftovers and avoid cooking additional meals, I do it. This week, I saved leftover waffles and gave them to my husband for breakfast the next morning. I also made sure that my husband took the leftovers he had avoided earlier in the week for lunch before they went bad (evil laugh) **Don’t feel sorry for him, I am usually the one who eats the undesirable items in our fridge each week…which I secretly love, but don’t tell him!
5. Avoided late fees
Luckily, I remembered to check and see which day our library books were due (which happened to be that day!!) so I avoided a lot of late fees by renewing the books online and then returned them the next time I ran to town.
The Thrifty Educator 