By Isabella Sorresso

When I was a kid, my mom had a chore chart to list the things we needed to accomplish each week and we would get awarded a small allowance for completing everything. At the time, I hated doing chores, but now I see she was teaching me valuable life skills without me even realizing it. Learning doesn’t have to be a chore though, and teaching your child life skills at any age can be achieved with these five activities that can be easily incorporated into your everyday life!

Board games
Playing board games like Monopoly, Scrabble and Clue with your kids will teach them to think critically and use that information to make choices and decisions about their game strategy. Then, they can see in real time how their choices play out and how they might want to change their plans for next time.

Ordering at restaurants
Having your child order for themselves at restaurants can encourage both decision making and communication skills. Ordering alone might prompt nervous looks to mom for help the first few times, but your little one will soon get used to it and feel more confident in picking their food. It’s also a great time to teach your kids how to use their best manners and social skills with the variety of new people they’ll interact with in life.

Baking
Baking offers a variety of ways you can teach your kids life skills and even help reinforce some of the lessons they’re learning in school. Whether your child is doing a lot of the work or just pouring the ingredients into the bowl for you, baking with kids will teach them about math with measuring, about science with temperature, and about how important it can be to follow the directions.

Writing in the calendar
Keeping a calendar at home of the whole month will help your kids learn time management, a very difficult skill to hone. Have them keep track of sports practices, music lessons, play dates with friends and anything else on their schedules. This is also a great way to help them (and you!) remember when they have tests or assignments due!

Splitting up allowance
Last but not least, teaching your child how to split up their allowance can help to teach them finances and saving their money for the future. My mom would have us split our allowance into parts to determine how much we could pocket right then, and how much we should save for the future to buy a toy we wanted or to donate at church the next week.