The decision to homeschool your children is a difficult one and involves lots of time, organization, and commitment. But it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. More and more parents are using the back of cereal boxes to educate their children at home, allowing them to save money on supplies while sparing themselves the headache of teaching. Follow these simple steps to get your homeschool curriculum up and running:
1. Drive to Costco
Since your curriculum consists entirely of cereal boxes, we suggest buying them at a warehouse club to save you the time and money it would take to purchase each box individually. Sure, your kids are probably getting the same brainteasers on each box, but you can rotate two or three brands for variety.
2. Locate the Clearance Aisle
Remember, you’re doing this because you don’t want to invest too much in your children’s education, so you want to make sure you’re buying the cheapest brands. Some of these boxes won’t have activities on the back but that doesn’t mean your child can’t learn to read those challenging ingredients.
3. Find Engaging Content
We’ve found that Cocoa Puffs and Cinnamon Toast Crunch are the most engaging in terms of the characters on the box. And the more colorful the cereal (literally), the more likely it is to contain complex chemical ingredients for your child to attempt to pronounce.
4. Buy Some Big-Ass Pallets of Cereal
Once you found the brands with the right balance of price and educational value, ask a salesperson if they could get you a whole shipping pallet of each. This makes it easier when you ask them to transport them to your car with the forklift. If they give you a hard time, explain that you’re using the cereal to homeschool your kids.
5. Stock up on Milk
Parents often forget to buy milk on their first trip, but milk is a key ingredient when homeschooling your kids with cereal boxes. Fine-tune your children’s motor skills by having them learn to pour it themselves. Who said you can’t do physical education at home?!
6. Serve for Breakfast and Lunch
Let class begin! Pour them a heaping bowl of cereal, and place the box right behind the bowl so that the back faces them. This should occupy them for three hours or so. Don’t give them a pencil until lunch. At lunch, let them fill out the activities. When they’re done, tell them to erase their answers so they can reuse it the following day.
7. Sit Back and Relax
You’ve done your work getting that cereal, so now you’re free to do whatever you want! If your kids have questions about their assignments, simply tell them, “There’s no right answer.” This will encourage creative thinking.
8. Go Back to Costco
Depending on how fast your kids eat, each box will last 3-7 days. Each trip is a total pain in the ass, but think about the other moms who cart their kids off to real schools day after day and remember how good you have it.
This post was co-sponsored by General Mills and Costco.
