Welcome to home economics class! When combined with the fun of teaching our children, home responsibilities can be overwhelming. Thankfully, there are folks available to offer practical help. Finances, cooking and home organization are some of the topics we will be addressing through upcoming interviews and articles. We also want to tap into one of our richest resources - you! If you have practical tips, recipes or ideas, we want to hear from you.

I was a home economics major in college, but my emphasis was in gerontology and how home economics issues impact the elderly. I graduated when I was pregnant with our first child, but I was nowhere near ready to run a home. The paycheck went quickly in those years. I learned the difference between a need and a want, the misery of debt versus the joy of savings, and how many things you can cook if you have flour, eggs and milk. I know I am not alone in my lack of preparation to be a wife and mother, so I trust that this new column will provide you with encouragement and help.

This month we will start with saving money on the food budget. Rhonda Barfield (author of Real Life Homeschooling featured in our Fall 2002 issue) offers several ideas in her book Feed Your Family for $12 a Day. After having her third child, Rhonda stopped working outside the home and needed to shrink the food budget. She eventually saved almost $200 a month allowing their family to move from a rapidly declining neighborhood to a much nicer suburb. In our inaugural home economics column Rhonda discusses how we can make a dent in our food budgets. Welcome, Rhonda!

Rhonda: The marvelous thing about saving money on groceries is it is something that everybody can do. You may have major debt, but you can begin saving money on groceries the next time you go to the store. To start, find my book and go through each chapter. If you feel you don't have time for it, make it into a home economics course and count it as credit. Start by implementing one strategy a week.

The tip that saves the most money is to have some sort of cooking system. If you are cooking from scratch, you will save money. Get your children involved, too. We have junior chef I and junior chef II. Junior chef I helps to get something started in the morning, as my own cooking system starts in the morning for about fifteen minutes. Then, right before dinner, junior chef II will set the table and help with the rest of the mal preparation. You are saving money and time, and you are teaching your children.

People have told me that the thing that discourages them the most is not homeschooling; it is the housework. I recently read about a woman who has ten children. All ten of them do ten minutes of chores several times a day. It is a little bitty time block with fantastic results. I have seen other families take Friday morning, and everybody cleans. I always hated that! That is why I don't like the freezer cooking system. Spending all day cooking is almost unbearable to me. But we can deal with fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes right before dinner. That works for us.

TOS: I used to tell my husband, "I can teach your children, or I can feed them." I felt like I could not do both. For us, the freezer system is the answer. Every family is different.

Rhonda: Right, and you can think of this as a family project. I took all of my children shopping when they were very young. People would say, "This is nuts." But it was all part of our homeschooling when they were young. They learned about consumer economics, cooking and shopping, and they are going to go into their lives after high school prepared.

TOS: Desperation can cause us to get resources that make life work. And homeschooling can push us to that because it stretches our time and our energy.

Rhonda: My passion began as trying to save money and wanting to convey that to others. Now I see that homeschoolers need resources on how to save money, how to save time and how to get their housework done - then they can get all that out of the way and actually have time to relax and enjoy homeschooling.

Diane Wheeler is the senior staff writer for The Old Schoolhouse Magazine. She and her husband John live in Placerville, California, with their five junior chefs Madelaine, Zachary, Rex, Claire and Brennan.