Subscribe

Apple | Spotify | Youtube | Amazon

About this episode

Brett and Ellen offer practical strategies for cost-effective homeschooling, highlighting the importance of planning, leveraging community resources, and prioritising experiences over expensive materials. They also discuss the benefits of utilising government support, preparing learning spaces, and investing wisely in durable educational tools.

🎧 Tune into this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify by clicking here. 

Key Points:

• Financial Planning: Starting with an understanding of personal finances, budgeting for homeschooling is part of the family budget. This includes planning and prioritising expenses.
• Valuing Experiences: Placing a high value on experiences rather than expensive materials, and understanding that the value of experiences outweighs material costs.
• Government Benefits and Tax Breaks: Investigating available government assistance, such as tax breaks and additional benefits for homeschooling families, and ensuring to inquire and be informed about them.
• Utilising Community Resources: Leveraging libraries, museums, parks, nature reserves, community centres, and community colleges for educational experiences, as well as embracing volunteering opportunities as part of learning.
• Organising Affordable Local Field Trips: Planning various educational outings that can range from free to low-cost, tying them into the learning curriculum, and ensuring these activities are enjoyable and memorable for children.
• Organisation and Preparation: The importance of organising learning materials and planning resources needed in advance to facilitate a smooth and enjoyable learning experience.
• Creating Conducive Learning Spaces: Setting up learning environments that are inviting and effective for the child, and being adaptable with the learning space whether it’s a dedicated room or a family area like the kitchen table.
• Investing in Quality Equipment: Recommending investment in items that offer long-term value, such as a good chair for the child’s comfort during learning, and being creative with resources to facilitate learning.

transcript

Brett Campbell (00:00.687)
Hello and welcome to another episode of Future Learners. My name is Brett Campbell, Chairman and CEO of Euka Future Learning and I am joined by my wonderful co -host, as always, the one and only, the founder and the head of education here at Euka, Ellen Brown. How are you, Ellen?

Ellen (00:17.918)
Well, thank you, Brett!

Brett Campbell (00:18.639)
I do that to amuse my own ADHD there. I’m trying to mix up the intro slightly a little bit. But we are gonna be talking about a topic that I know today. Everyone likes a little bit of a savings, right? Everyone likes to save money. And we’re gonna talk about homeschooling on a budget. Like how much money do you really need to be spending on the homeschooling journey?

I guess that the real answer there is how long is a piece of string, but we’re going to do our best to define how long a piece of string is here today. But before we do, I just want to thank everyone for tuning in, for leaving us comments, especially those of you who are dropping five star reviews over on iTunes and Spotify. And if you haven’t, don’t worry, there is still time to share the love. Head over to iTunes and Spotify and leave us a nice comment. Let us know if you’re enjoying the show. It helps these episodes.

to be listened by more people. Obviously, it helps with all the algorithms, all of those things that you already know. I’m just hoping that you’re going to jump on the train and drop us a review or comment. We really, really appreciate that. So, Alan, homeschooling on a budget. I mean, you’re a bit of a master at this when it comes to, I mean, you’ve trialled and tested every variation essentially as it relates to homeschooling. You you’ve homeschooled many of your children, been doing it for many, many,

many years. Even though you’re still only 21 though, Ellen. The maths doesn’t work out, but it’s that that’s the truth. Tell us where where’s the best place to start for a family member when it comes to homeschooling on a budget? What do we do?

Ellen (01:45.918)
Absolutely.

Ellen (01:51.006)
I’m gonna go to bed.

Ellen (01:59.23)
Well, look, you know, as you’ve mentioned before, Brett, we have done a financial literacy podcast before and starting from the beginning about looking at your finances, planning and budgeting and homeschooling is no different to that. That’s one part of your family budget. Wouldn’t you agree?

Brett Campbell (02:17.839)
Absolutely. I mean, budget is, budget’s an interesting one. Um, you know, and it’s, it always comes back to where people place value on something. So I have specific areas where if you watch me and my spending habits, um, so I’ve got a, a spending habit that I’ve created over the last five or six years and it’s, um, related to red wine. Okay.

I really like, and you know this, I really like a nice red wine. So I’m happy to spend more than normal on a bottle of red wine because of the experience and the value that I receive from it. Right. So I place high value on that. Now, of course there’s other elements where I don’t want to go and pay $4 .50 for a powerade because I could get that from Will Worse for $3. So there’s, there’s what do you place value on? Right. So this is where it comes back to when anyone sits down and looks at any budget. Um,

You know, it really comes down to the nuts and bolts, first and foremost, the cold hard facts of what money allocation do you have available to start with? Because you might not need to be, you know, when I say homeschooling on a budget, like there could be things where you’re like, Oh, it doesn’t matter if a $20 textbook comes up and I have to buy it. Or it doesn’t matter if we have to do that. But for some families, you know, we have to be a little bit more tighter on the budget. And you’ve, you’ve got to, I remember when I was a kid, yeah, my mom would go to the grocery shop and we’d have everything.

listed down would have the price of what it was going to be. And you’d be working out your totals to go, okay, well, this is what we can get. And that’s a smart thing to do because you don’t want to get to the, to the counter and you got $400 worth of groceries. I mean, in this day and age inflation, you’ve got $800 worth of groceries, right? And you’ve only got $400 for it. So it comes back to that intentional planning, which is very, very, very important when you’re setting any form of budget. Um, because there’s the,

what you would love to potentially do, but then there’s what’s the reality of that. So that’s the, that’s the starting point is what, and this is a conversation you probably have to sit down. If you’ve obviously got a partner, you sit down with your partner and go, okay, well, we’re about to embark on this. What do we have as an allocation of weekly budget after all the bills are done and now, and hopefully some savings can be put away, et cetera. What do we have to allocate? Now it doesn’t mean you have to spend it all.

Brett Campbell (04:41.615)
but it means you sit down and you go, okay, well, each week we could create a bank account, right? That is called education. Just go and create another savings account that’s online. And every week you set up an auto payment that sends, whether it’s 20 bucks, 50 bucks, a hundred bucks, whatever that is that you can allocate into that fund. So then now all of a sudden, you know that, okay, cause you might not need to buy something every month, right? You might need to purchase something every couple of months.

Sometimes it might be a couple of weeks in a row that you need to purchase things, et cetera, et cetera. So I’d be looking at it through that lens first and foremost. And, and I mean, we can get into a little bit more tactics if you like as well around that. Um, but it really comes back to starting with the plan. What is our plan? And we’ve talked about plans and at nauseam as it relates to how do you get the most out of your day? How do you get the most out of your week, et cetera? This is a really, really important topic of how do you get the most out of the budget that you are applying to?

said regime that you’re creating.

Ellen (05:45.918)
Yeah, absolutely. I like what you said about, you know, when you went to the grocery store with your mom and you know, you were aware of what needed to be spent and what didn’t. I think bringing older kids into the discussion about tracking expenses, understanding what’s, you know, what’s available and what you want to spend that money on will really be a great learning experience for them as well. So including kids is really good. The other thing it probably is worth looking at when you’re talking about

Brett Campbell (06:06.989)
Yeah.

Ellen (06:13.276)
you know, financial planning and budgeting for homeschooling is if you are on some kind of benefit through Centrelink, finding out what kind of benefits that you can get that actually, and sometimes you can go to Centrelink and they don’t know so you need to find out yourself, but there are access to different kinds of tax breaks and even

an increased amount of money and your benefit and things like that if you are homeschooling, but only if you know about it and ask about it. So being aware of what’s available to you as far as government help is a really good one to get into as well. All right, on to the second thing.

Brett Campbell (06:48.431)
Yeah, absolutely.

Ellen (06:52.67)
So the next thing to talk about would be utilizing community resources for homeschooling. So often, you know, we all know there’s a library and you can go to the library, you know, but there’s a lot more than a library. The funny thing is until you start looking, you don’t realize how many museums, parks, nature reserves, community centers, community college, you know, they’ll accept your teenager to go and do pottery for a whole term for $30. So finding out what’s going on at your community college.

you’ll get information like that from your local library. But also another great resource is actually volunteering, you know, you can volunteer as far as on nature type. What was it was like a tree planting day that my kids got a lot out of being part of that group. And also the boys have joined the men’s shed, you know, so there are a lot of things in the community that are very low cost or no cost.

that are really great opportunities for learning and can really be part of your education.

Brett Campbell (07:52.399)
Yeah, that’s a great point to double tap on is there’s so much that goes on in the communities that you’re just not even aware of, like events that come up, social events, even free concerts, free, like lots of these things are actually occurring. You just need to jump in and do a Google search on a few of it and start looking and even going to your local council’s websites and seeing all the initiatives that they have there.

go and join the free yoga class for your fitness session or go and join the, you know, there’s so many opportunities there. And I think the key once again is sitting down, looking at it and going, what, what would be valuable? Where would it be valuable? And what can we take advantage of? Of course, that’s a, that’s a really good one. Um, and keeping in mind, um, as it relates to community resources, I mean, I feel libraries are becoming.

almost extinct. I hope they don’t because there’s just something about a library. Right now we’ve got our smartphones and Kindles and you can literally download any book you want basically at any time. Right. But there’s just something about sending your kid to the library. Now, of course age dependent or even going with your child to the library to expose them to like, there’s something about walking into a library and you see 5 ,000 books like

It just feels like knowledge, right? It feels there’s something about the library. I used to love going to the library and getting my three books that I get to take out and then bring them back at the end of the week. I mean, I hope that’s something that that’ll just become more of a niche opportunity versus yeah, you’ve got your iPhone and you’ve got access to 85 ,000 books at the click of your finger, but there’s something about that, you know, and, and baking that into your educational journey.

and your learnings with your children is a really, really cool opportunity to expose them to extra things as well. And it gets you out of the home. It gets you out doing a field trip, all of those things. So you’ll be surprised what’s in your community.

Ellen (09:57.374)
Yeah. Actually, interesting, you should say that about the library because the library, I think they’re well aware about, you know, the fact that people’s use of online products are changing the way they use the library. So now they do things like they have authored talks there. And they have all kinds of things like mindfulness sessions and

Lots of community events happening in the library. So of course, for little ones every single week, they have story time and you can go to story time, then they do a craft activity. And that’s your whole morning taken up. You could do that once a week and really feel like that’s a really good part of your calendar. So that’s fine for the little ones. But if you go to the library and ask what have you got coming up, you’ll be surprised at how many they get people in from the community to talk and they get authors in illustrators into talk and

So there’s a lot of things going on at the library that you’d be surprised about these days. Not to mention the fact that you can borrow books and movies now, like they have everything online as well from the library. So you don’t even have to, we are talking about budgets. You know, you could get rid of Audible or any of those, because they have all the audio books and movies that you can get directly from the library and it doesn’t cost you anything. So it’s a really wonderful resource, really.

Brett Campbell (11:16.399)
Yeah, no it is, absolutely.

Ellen (11:19.71)
Okay, so what about, oh, that was something else that popped into my mind when we talked about community resources. There’s no better community resource beside the library than the homeschooling group in your area or areas nearby, because often what they’ll do is say, okay, well, schools go in groups, they get a discount to go to the zoo or to the museum.

So they’ll say, look, we’re organizing a field trip on this particular day and you get access to all those discount prices that schools would get if you go in a group. If you can’t find one in community, start one, start one and.

you know, post it up on Facebook on the homeschooler site and say, Look, I’ve organized we’re going to the water park on this particular day. It’s, it gives you the cheaper prices. And it also ticks that box for socialization, making friends with other kids that are homeschooling as well. And you’re out of school hours. So I mean, you’re in school hours, so you don’t have to have the Russian the Russian bustle that you would if you went on the weekend.

Brett Campbell (12:15.631)
I want to ask a question that I know parents will certainly have is if we’re looking at baselines here, what would you suggest as a starting contribution towards, and I know again, it depends on what you need, but if a parent’s just like, hey, look, how much am I roughly going to need to be able to go through a year of homeschooling?

to get the, let’s call it the basic necessities.

Ellen (12:52.254)
right. Well, it’s really down to the nitty gritty. So, you know, obviously, your program, your curriculum is going to be your your core cost. You know, that’s the thing that you’re that where all your lessons are and all your activities. So you can tick that off as far as your curriculum is concerned. So the price of that will be dependent on how old your child is and what grade they’re in. But that would be the first.

and major cost of your homeschooling. And then it comes down to supplies and activities and all of those things. There’s ways around making those things more accessible if you don’t have very much money. There’s no problems with going to garage sales or thrift stores to get supplies. And look, these days, Kmart, you know, reject shop, there’s heaps of places to go and get art supplies. You know, obviously,

having done homeschooling for a long time. And when I started homeschooling, there wasn’t the option of being able to enroll in a program like UCAS. So for me, having that core learning right gives me then the flexibility to say, okay, I can make savings in places where I need to. And, you know, trying to make sure that when you do join a program,

that you’re not joining something that then says you need to go and get all these textbooks because there’s traps like that, you know, or it says, you know, if even in New Griffith says, you know, you need to do this watercolour painting, you don’t have watercolours, you only have crayons. Well, do it with crayons, you know, be flexible, be adaptive, be creative in your own mind and realise that, you know, just because something is a suggestion doesn’t mean it’s, you know,

a law. And so being able to be creative and do things a bit different, I just, I wouldn’t sacrifice money on the actual lessons and program itself, but I would be creative and have always been creative with what I can do on a budget as far as where I get my supplies and the activities that we do.

Brett Campbell (14:44.687)
course.

Brett Campbell (14:54.415)
So it could be, you know, circa a few hundred dollars a year, all the way up to a few thousand dollars a year, depending on how you want to organize your activities and any extracurricular items, things that you want to be able to include, which again, comes down to you as a family and you know, what you’ve sat down and you’ve architected at the very front and looked at, okay, what are we aiming to do here? And then,

Ellen (15:09.534)
Hmm.

Brett Campbell (15:20.911)
moving from there. So I just want to put a bit of a placeholder on that because I know there always is the questions of, and it’s a very fair question too, because it’s, you know, you’ve got to know what you’re sort of getting into. But I think the beauty that, and 99 % of our answers to questions that really come back as it relates to UCRE and homeschooling is you have ultimate flexibility. You know, if you don’t have pens or crayons, go and dig a hole in the ground and use dirt and,

Use dirt to paint a picture. Be creative. You know, like there’s options everywhere. So cool. I just wanted to really jump on to that point because I know there’ll be some heads spinning around, but what, how much is it? So continue on, Alan. What do we got next?

Ellen (16:03.966)
Yes, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, well, next it’s about homeschooling spaces. Honestly, if I go on Pinterest, and I look up homeschooling spaces, I see the most amazing spaces and everything so well organized and all got labels and I just love that kind of thing. I’m not necessarily naturally an organized person, but I totally love and appreciate it when I see it. I suppose it’s for me, it’s been important not to get caught up with.

that you know if I am doing it and I am wanting to be um budgeting then I’m pretty careful about what I actually print out and what I actually keep and how I keep it so as long as I can say to myself you know I’ve had I’ve had both I’ve had a time where I had a homeschooling room where we were all set up and everyone had a desk and that was like and then I’ve also had

the kitchen table where kids are coming and going and, and to be honest, even when we had a homeschooling room, it always ended up in the kitchen table because at some point, I’m busy doing something in the kitchen and the kids follow you in and they’ll sit down and they’ll begin whatever they’re doing there anyway, or we find it’s paints and we need the sink or whatever. So, you know, it’s wonderful if I guess at the end, it’s got to work for you. If you’ve got a homeschooling room and you can and you can set it up, there’s lots of great

containers and ways of storing things and ideas and that’s where I think you’ve got to be flexible because over time and different age levels what you need changes. So being smart about saying okay we probably we might not need five easels or we might not need this big setup because very soon they won’t be wanting to use easels. If you don’t have the space for that or the budget for that you might say you know what we’re going to have.

You know what I did? I actually went and got an old dining table from Vinny’s or somewhere and it was a big dining table and I got the legs cut off so they’re only half as high and then I got some little plastic chairs so all of a sudden we had this huge big table that we could use and it didn’t matter what happened on it didn’t matter about pencils, glue, crayons, paint, anything it was the table just for doing homeschooling when they were small and it was the best thing I ever had so.

Ellen (18:21.598)
Yeah, it’s about being creative and flexible. That obviously didn’t last right up through because we don’t sit there anymore. But, you know, talking to other parents is also a great resource when it comes to how to get organized, but never get drowned out by the parents. Always think to yourself, what works best in my space, in my house, you know?

Brett Campbell (18:40.079)
Yeah. And, and what works best for your ability to manage long -term. That’s really important. For example. Um, so we’ve got a room here for Ayla and got a, got a little desk there and she’s got a little cubby house in the corner and her drawers and all of those things. And Emily loves to be, she’s very close to being very organized. Right. So she, and I’ll frame that because there’s a couple of caveats, but.

So she likes order, you know, like when it comes to things and Ayla will leave the room and there’s stuff all lying around the place. So the pens get picked up, put in the cup and this and that. And then she comes to me the other day, she goes, where’s the white paint? I’m like, what for? She’s like, oh, she’s drawn all over the white. Like we’ve got a nice little white table in there. I’m like,

There’s no way we’re painting that thing until she stops painting and drawing on it. Like it’s all part of the, so that purchasing something for you, right? Or getting something in the room that makes you feel good may not be the best thing because it may lead you to not feeling so good. Cause now you’re seeing a table with pen or on it, or the walls are all drawn on it. And I’m talking about more the younger, younger children here. Um, although those, the older ones definitely like to do a bit of graffiti every so often. Um, but.

This comes back to environment, right? And I love this topic of environment. It’s, it’s one of those, um, again, in, in my book, just a shameless plug there, um, called right now, right? Which is a framework of how do we, how do we reach success in our life? And one of the areas that we need to develop is, I’m sorry, is to, um, yeah, to develop is our self and then our surroundings, right? And surroundings within that there’s key environments and.

the environment that’s going to be most conducive for someone to want to sit in there. Right. There’s, there’s nothing worse than creating an environment that someone wants to get out of really quickly. Right. When I, and I shared this in a couple of previous episodes where when I was in high school, my desk in my English class, it got to a point where I’d walk in the classroom straight out the corridor and I’ll be sitting in the hallway, this real long, like 40 meter corridor. That’s like,

Brett Campbell (21:05.199)
three meters wide and 40 meters long and there’s nothing in there. And it’s just my desk. And for some reason I ended up loving it. Even though I was noisy and destructive as a person, there was something about me sitting in a quiet, peaceful, no other distraction environment. And, and I quickly realized that’s that is an, so then I ended up getting my work done even quicker, which caused more problems for the teacher. Cause then I didn’t know what to do after that. So.

It was creating an environment that worked for me, not an environment that works for you as the parent, although that’s very important as well. Um, it’s gotta be an environment that is conducive to your child. And here’s another thing as well as to consider is I want everyone to think about, uh, and I said the word a little bit earlier when it come to value, we need to place value on certain things. Okay. Um, and of course everyone has their own reason as to why they’re to place value on something.

A good chair is very, very good value. It’s a good investment. A $20 chair from Ikea or from down at the local shop somewhere is, and this is my view, is not the greatest investment if your child’s going to be sitting on it for a couple of three hours a day or whatever it may be, depending on their level of where they’re at, right, from learning. But I’ve invested well into my chair because I’m sitting on it so much that…

the purchase price of said chair is gonna far outweigh the amount of times I need to go to the physio because I’ve got a sore back or sore shoulder or something, right? So it’s thinking long -term as well. So there’s some key things that I would highly recommend and sit down and go, what are the things that are valuable? And if you look at, and your child learns really well through doing, as an example.

Place value in experiences. Like you might be like, well, I don’t really, I generally wouldn’t spend $50 to go to this thing and do it and be a part of it. But if it’s going to provide that experience, don’t ever, don’t ever discount the value, the upside value of an experience that you can have with your child. I think that’s something that’s really important because we as adults have things that we’ve been exposed to throughout our life. And a lot of our,

Ellen (23:01.318)
Yep.

Brett Campbell (23:31.087)
value creation or our value proposition is based on experiences we’ve had. But if you could wipe that out for a second and go, but what would be really valuable here? Like now an $80 pencil is not a very good value proposition to give to your child, like the most expensive crayons. It’s like, well, do you really need to spend that much on crayons? Could you save on the crayons? But you invest a little bit more on an experience, right?

Can you, so it’s really having a look at that and where we’re placing value on certain things as well. What are the things, Alan, in homeschooling for you that you always placed value on and where you weren’t afraid to sort of invest?

Ellen (24:15.358)
Well, you’re gonna laugh. You’re gonna laugh at this, Brett, because mine was the crayons. Because I actually really, I really valued that if a child was going to sit down and do something, they’re going to create something. I wanted it to be vibrant and colorful. You know, when you go, I don’t want to be mean to Kmart, but you know, when you go and you buy colored markers at Kmart and they’ll color them and there’s not really much color there.

I’d rather spend a bit more and get the Crayola ones or something that have got really bright colors. So I did, I did that. And I also valued the type of paper that they were using depending on what they were doing. So I was very happy to get a big roll of the butcher’s paper for mucking around kind of stuff. But if they’re going to do a portrait of their family, get good quality paper, because that’s the kind of thing you want to keep for so long. So I do value those kinds of things. But when it comes to organization, one thing I valued that’s not a thing,

Brett Campbell (25:02.285)
Yeah.

Ellen (25:13.79)
was autonomy. So right from small, we had a rule that was finish what you do before you start something new. And that meant that when they were going to finish an activity, they had to finish it by putting things away. So I always made sure that their containers for things like scissors and paint and everything else was low down so that they were completely capable of packing up everything.

before we start the next thing. It was just a little saying probably came from my mum.

Brett Campbell (25:40.687)
Man, I would have been in trouble from you. I would have gotten in trouble.

Ellen (25:47.294)
Oh look, I think I used to say it from very small finish what you do before you start something new and sometimes that meant that we know obviously I was packing up with them but we’d say it together and we’d get used to doing that and so from you know I never had a thing where I said okay well the scissors are sharp and I’ve got to put them up high or that you know if it’s something that we use they need to be able to put it away themselves they need to go and get it when they need it and

Sometimes it takes longer because you’re getting them to wash out the paint brushes or you’re getting them to clean the table and it takes longer but it’s so worthwhile because it sets you up for success. So when it came to organization making sure that things were all accessible for them and they knew where to put things away and then as they became teenagers I found that it helped them to know where all of their activity sheets were at the beginning of terms.

I had it printed, I had it in subjects and I had it in folders with their names and sounds a bit schooly, but that worked well for them. There was none of that, where do I start now and what do I do now? And that worked out really well. And so yes, being organized is a good one. And when it comes to, you know, things like practical hands -on activities, which, you know, we have a lot of that, cause my kids really learn well that way.

Brett Campbell (26:48.847)
Oh, it’s an organization.

Ellen (27:09.406)
Honestly, unless I could take I had to really push myself and make sure that I had a look over what resources I’d need for the week ahead so that I could make sure that I had those and then it was smooth sailing and it was enjoyable. But when I didn’t, I was like, Oh, we’ll do that later. I have to pop to the shop and get some bicarb soda or whatever it is. So, so the more organized you can be, the better it’s going to be for everybody’s everybody’s learning. All right.

Brett Campbell (27:26.735)
Yeah.

Brett Campbell (27:34.863)
And then what it does is it eliminates surprises as well. That’s the other thing. And, and if you are on a tighter budget and you need to watch where most dollars flow through, I highly recommend again, sitting down, creating a monthly budget. What can you put towards? And maybe it’s at the start of the year, you know what? We have a thousand dollars that we’re going to put away here. We’ve got a few hundred dollars, whatever that looks like to start with. You put it away. And then to your point.

Ellen (27:39.966)
Yeah.

Brett Campbell (28:02.255)
And we talked about this in the planning, your day, your week, your month, your term, et cetera, is get ahead of the game. Because if you’re reactive to Alan’s point and you’re, Oh, no bike outside. Oh, we won’t do that. All right. Just read a book or do that less than the, and the LMS again, it’s like, it’s not going to be the, again, the most conducive environment. And that in itself will just lead to more chaos. And the beauty is, is what it’ll do is I think this is a real exciting one is plan a field trip.

plan field trips, try and do as many out of the, um, out of the environment, current environment activities that you can do. Some are going to be free. You know, you might have to pay some gas to get to a park, but you know, walk to the park or you there, there could be something that, you know, you want to go and do, you know, we’re going to go and spend a day or we’re going to do a night away and we’re going to go camping and we’re going to, we’re going to look at, we’re going to go to the beach or we’re going to do X, Y, Z. And then you can tie that into a lesson. And, and then you’re, you’re.

something to get excited about as well. Right. It’s, it’s to get excited about, and those are the moments that are going to be the moments of memory for your children. Um, you know, not if they got a $8 ham sandwich or a $3 ham sandwich. Like the reality is, is it’s the experiences that I believe generally will always leave the mark of memory. Um, the most so, Ellen, let’s, um, what do we got to wrap this up? I think, um,

There’s some really good stuff we’ve been able to share here on how you can homeschool on a budget or how you can go totally ham and spend as much as you want on your educational journey if you decide that to be something you want to do.

Ellen (29:29.212)
Yeah.

Ellen (29:42.302)
Yeah, absolutely. Look, to wrap it up, I would say I love what you were just saying about field trips and things like that. Because getting out of what you see every day, it then leads to other field trips. You know, if you if you I don’t know if you’re close enough to get to the city, if it’s, you know, less than an hour and a half in the train, just going on the train to the city, all of a sudden you discover things there, they think, oh, next time we’ll go and see that, you know, there’s so many things.

If you even just Google museum, you know, you can go to the Holocaust Museum, you can go to the Natural Museum, you can go to the Mineral Museum, you can go and see where money’s made, you know, there’s so many different things for kids, they can go and stand and look down at the stock exchange. They’re just, it’s just, honestly, it’s just endless. But even something as simple as baking some cupcakes and going down the fire station, we have had the best field trips doing something like that.

because you know, the guys are so happy to show the kids a firetrucks and it’s just the most wonderful opportunities. So, you know, I guess, looking ahead at what the kids are doing in their lessons and so and letting your mind go wild, how can we actually do some of the things that they’re doing in their lessons? How can we connect that to what’s going on out there in the world? And it doesn’t have to be expensive. Like you said, it’s up to you really how much you want to spend on those things.

Brett Campbell (31:03.011)
Yep, absolutely. All right, well, there we go. Nice short and sharp episode today. Hopefully you’ve gotten some value out of this episode. If you have, please share it with someone else who you think will also get value. And of course, before we wrap up, please head over to iTunes, Spotify. If you haven’t done so already, drop us a five -star review and we will see you on the next episode. See ya.