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If your family is like ours keeping utility costs low is not only a budgetary concern, it’s an environmental one as well. The less we consume, the lighter our footprint on the planet. It’s not enough for kids to learn to reuse, recycle and upcycle, we have to really work on that third R: Reduce. Utilities are both expensive and a fact of life. While you can skip purchasing entertainment and can go without haircuts for long periods of time in order to save money, you can’t really decide not to buy electric or water services. However, there are plenty of things you can do in order to lower your utility costs. Shutting of lights when you’re not using them is obvious, but there are other, very simple ways to significantly reduce your utility bill as well as your impact on the planet.

Turn Off Unused Lights and Appliances

Many families waste electricity by leaving lights on that are not being used. For example, if you go into the kitchen to have a late night snack and don’t turn off the light before heading back to bed, you’re wasting a lot of electricity, as nobody in your home benefits from this light. Get in the habit of turning off lights before leaving a room and teach your children to do the same in order to save electricity costs.

Similarly, you should turn of televisions, radios and other appliances that are not being used. This strategy may endear you to your neighbors as well as help you save on your utility bills, as a blaring television or radio can disturb others.

Control Temperature Through Clothing

Instead of using heat or air conditioning to control your home’s temperature, adjust the clothing you wear. You can save electricity by keeping your home slightly warmer in the summer and slightly cooler in the winter. Keep your thermostat set to 68 degrees during winter time and 78 degrees in the summer. This allows the air conditioning unit to run more effectively. If you are too hot or cold at these temperatures, change your clothes. Wearing sweaters in the winter or tank tops in the summer can help you stay comfortable without using an excessive amount of electricity.

Unplug Chargers and Cords When Not In Use

If you keep your phone charger plugged in when your phone is not being charged, it draws a tiny bit of electricity. Over the course of a month, this can really add up. Instead, unplug your phone charger when you are not charging your phone. Similarly, unplug small appliances like toaster ovens and coffee makers when not in use to save electricity.

Don’t Start Your Shower Prematurely

People sometimes turn on the shower before getting everything they need for a pleasant shower experience. Wait until you are sure you are ready to get in before you turn on your shower so that you don’t waste water. To save additional money on your utilities, consider showering in the dark so that you don’t use electricity while you are showering either. Make sure that your bathroom floor is free of obstacles before trying this electricity-saving tip so that you don’t fall over anything in the dark.

Dry Dishes and Clothes Manually

You can save electricity by not running the dry cycle on your dishwasher and by avoiding using a clothes dryer to dry your clothes. To save money on washing your dishes, don’t run the dishwasher until it is completely full. Then, watch it and turn it off as soon as the rinse cycle is finished. Open the dishwasher and let the dishes air dry.

Similarly, you can hang both towels and clothes on a clothesline outside to dry them on sunny days. Even if you prefer to use your clothes dryer for clothes, you should consider air-drying heavy items such as towels and bath mats to save energy. One family we know reduced their utility bill by $30 a month by switching to line drying their clothing alone!

If you follow these energy-saving tips, you should soon see a dramatic reduction in your utility bills. There are plenty of other things you can do to save energy as well; just get in the habit of saving energy whenever you can and new, creative ways of conserving electricity and water will occur to you. Better yet, make it a family challenge! Give the kids the job of coming up with bigger, better, faster ways of lowering the utility bills and reward them with part of the proceeds!

What does your family do to save money and the planet at the same time?

Author Bio:

Tom writes for Heating Oil Shopper, a leading source of information on a range of topics related to home heating oil pricing .

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Teaching Writing to Young Children

For many parents, simply that title is enough to strike fear into their hearts.

Writing:

• That hated high school subject.
• The chore most dreaded following Christmas (WRITING those thank you notes).
• The most nebulous portion of the SAT (how DO they actually grade those essays?).
• The college class we all put off until the last possible moment and yawned our way through.

Writing.

Some say it can be learned. Other’s say it’s a gift. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, although leaning strongly toward the “learned” camp.

In the new millennium, few people truly write.

• E-mail doesn’t count.
• Neither does your grocery list.
• Nor does that note to get your kid out of gym class… no matter how creative your explanation of his sprained ankle was.
• Most of us don’t even write letters, much less memoirs, or articles or books.
• Most of us sit down at a computer, or stare at a blank paper and ask the same question we asked in tenth grade: “What do I write?”
• Or, we know what we want to write, but are disappointed with the end product because we lack the mechanics as well as the art to really do our ideas justice.

It is difficult.

It is bad enough to struggle with one’s own writing. It is entirely another thing to, with great fear and trepidation, try to teach our children to write.

It is one of the most frequently asked questions. One of the greatest concerns of home educators: HOW can I teach my child to do this terribly difficult thing that I myself find mortally painful and am only marginally successful at?

The 3 R’s

The answer, is blessedly simple. I call it the three Rs (no, not those 3Rs)

They are as follows: Relax, Read, Respond. Of course, this is a highly simplified version, but it will carry you quite a long way.

RELAX!

The first, most necessary thing, is for parents to take a deep breath, and relax. If your children see that you are terrified of this and that you think it is the hardest thing ever, they will adopt your attitude and you’ll all be miserable.

• STOP looking at what curriculum everyone else is using.
• STOP freaking out about what kind of assignments your child is NOT completing.
• START engendering positive feelings about writing in yourself and working towards a “print rich environment,” as the professional educators among us would call it.

Attitude is everything. Relax. You can do this.

READ!

Next, read. Read, read, read, READ to your children. If you’re pregnant with #1 read to her. If you’ve got ten around the dinner table, read to them.

Whether they are toddlers and it’s picture books or they’re middle aged kids and it’s Ben-Hur and the Colonists (our two right now, though not in the same book, of course!) or whether they’re young adults and it’s the Wall Street journal for dinner time debate.

Read to one another.

This is perhaps the single biggest factor in teaching a child to write. Why? Because it is through reading that vocabulary is developed, that the differences in style between Mark Twain and E.B. White are appreciated, and that the flow of good language washes over the ears and into the hearts of young children.

Writing styles are not developed in a vacuum.

A teacher cannot expect a child to find his voice, literarily speaking, if he has not first listened to the voices of many others.

It is the same as teaching a toddler to speak. They listen for nearly two years before they find much to say for themselves. Why do we expect children who have not “listened” adequately to be able to “voice” themselves on paper?

Do not make the mistake of assuming that once your child is functionally literate and is reading “Captain Underpants” or some such pop-culture nonsense that your job as family reader is over. It is our job as parents not only to direct the literary diet that the child himself consumes, but to continue to spoon feed him (force feed if necessary!) the good stuff as long as he’s under our roof. Even adult children like to be read to… I know, I am one!

RESPOND!

The third R is Respond. Having been read to in a relaxed environment, the child should, after a period of time, be asked to respond.

This does NOT necessarily mean in writing.

• A four year old can respond to a paragraph long passage from Aesop’s Fables by retelling the moral of the story.
• A seven year old can retell a whole chapter.
• A nine year old a whole book… if you have enough time to listen!

The first response that ought to be required of a child is oral.

Have your little children narrate (re-tell) what they have heard you read. Then ask them what they liked best and why. In this way they will parrot the style of the author, use new vocabulary in context and form a personal connection with the literature. Make it relaxed, light hearted, and fun.

When children get a little older, say seven or eight, they can begin writing short paragraphs. It is at this point that most kids start to cry, and some mothers too. The child, if he has been read to enough, will have lots to say and an active imagination… but the mechanics of writing will still be difficult.

What’s a mom to do? Stand over the child and yell? Steal the joy of writing by making him rewrite fifteen times to dot all the Is and fix punctuation?

No! It’s so much simpler: have the child tell you what he wants to write, you faithfully transcribe his words, and then, he copies it neatly into his writing book.

In this way a child enjoys the creative aspect of writing. He learns proper form (by copying yours). And he has none of the negative reinforcement of that dreaded red pen that haunts you to this day. This approach should take you through the first several years. After fourth or fifth grade, the child will quite naturally start writing on his own, for fun, and at that point, you can begin a formal writing course, without fear.

Until then, Relax, Read and allow your child to Respond. Relax.

What has worked (or not) in your family to inspire your kids to love writing?

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For the past year, our family has been on a mission to reduce our household garbage and recycling.

We have examined our shopping habits, made many changes, and are proud to say that our family now throws out the equivalent of one medium size bag of garbage per month and we have cut down our recycling from four large bags to two large bags per month.

How’d we do it? Read on and I’ll show you, it’s easy! (more…)

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Energy is a hot topic these days. There is much talk about how to conserve it, or produce it with less environmental impact. So often these topics are weighty and we walk away feeling overwhelmed because the global problems seem insurmountable.

However, at the end of the day, it’s the individual that holds the keys: to the problem, or the solution. If each person, each family made the choice to use differently and use less, it really could change the world.

We could all do better. Here are ten easy ways to change our habits and reduce our carbon footprints! (more…)

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I read a lot of books. It’s an addiction, really. I should probably be participating in some sort of twelve step program. I know my husband considers it a personal victory that he’s moved me away from lugging pounds of paper books around in my backpack and has succeeded in converting me to light weight e-books.

One genre that has long occupied a hefty section of shelf space at our house has been “Green Living, or Eco-Living.” Most of these books were very old ones I stole from my Dad over the years; you know, the ones that were “Green and Eco” before there were buzz words.

There has been an explosion of good books (and a lot of nonsense ones too) in the past  ten years on every possible facet of Eco-Living. I’d like to take a minute to recommend three that are worth the time to read, especially if you’re interested in leading an Uncommon life in some way. (more…)