How to Save on Back to School Shopping

Back-to-school shopping is a fun way to get kids excited about a new school year. But buying too much in one shot can be a budget-buster for families and a stress trigger for children.

So it is suggested in the best interest of students and parents to research before making purchases two months earlier from the date school reopens. It softens the blow to your wallet and ensures that you buy only what your child really requires for their schooling. Follow­ing are the tips to save money and reduce the stress of back-to-school shopping.

Before even thinking about buying more school supplies, you have to figure out two things: what you need, and what you already have. Tackle what you need first; book shops, stationery stores and school. Further, e-commerce websites often give you list or suggest required student materials. Then, with lists in hand, scour the house to figure out which supplies you already own and what you have to buy now.

Once you’ve determined what to purchase, establish a budget and enforce it with your kids. When you plan to buy the backpack, lunchbox, sipper bottle, and binder, all with matching licensed cartoon character ( might at hefty price), it turns out  into a learning experience. You can tell your kids how exciting it would be to go to school with their favorite cartoon characters printed on their school supplies, and how they will look different among their peers. And same time also tell them the importance of studying and getting best grades so that they can still stand ahead of their peers in academic years and in life ahead.

Other tips to ease the pain of buying school supplies:

Shop Early: Most of the stores and web portals in the beginning of the school sessions offer Back-to-school products at discounted cost and sometimes in form of combo packs to entice shoppers into stores. Pick up those items you know you’ll need (lined notebooks, paper, pencils, crayons, folders, etc.), and the money you save can go toward bigger budget items.

Buy for whole year: Kids are not responsible like you. They keep missing their pencils, sharpeners and erasers so often in their schools. So it is better idea to buy some extra pieces, preferably in packs, so that you need not run to the stationery shops late in the evening after spending whole tiring day in office/ at home.

Involve your Kids while making List for Purchases: Let your child choose a few inexpensive items you know he’ll need, as well as a new lunch box and backpack if last year’s models just won’t do. To save time and money, consider picking up the rest of the items on the school supply list without your child.

Check for the best prices and Discounts: When you have done whole of your budgeting and listing of the items you have to buy for your kids, research on the websites, you might find it more beneficial, as  shopping online will help you save both money and time than to hop into the local school supply stores. As generally in the beginning of academic year these local stores run short in supply of many articles, mostly books and you have no other option to wait till they bring in the new stock. But when you shop online it is not the case in general. You can flip to another website if one store or website is running out of stock with some particular books or items you intend to buy. And most often you get the best discounts on online stores.

One month in: The first month of school is about establishing a daily schedule and morning routine. Invest in supplies that will help your child get orga­nized. For example, laminate a morning schedule and post it where he can’t miss it.

Two months in: Create a homework station and stock it with the necessary supplies. Consider a laminated homework schedule with built-in breaks. Make the station an inspirational place for your child, reflective of his personality.

The back-to-school shopping season often takes on the frantic pace of the weeks before the start of the academic sessions in April. By making your purchases over a few days earlier, you can make more thoughtful decisions and give you and your child time to figure out the tools he needs to do his best and be happy in school.

How to Teach Children Effective Time Management?

Too often kids and parents feel dissatisfied and disillusioned in the educational process. Parents might get frustrated in their efforts to help their children succeed, whereas a child might get frustrated getting up to his parent’s expectations. Now the question arises, how can parents help their children to be successful and find joy in learning? Parents can help their children thrive in school, and in life, by having pragmatic expectations of their children’s abilities and by helping them to develop independent work habits.

Working successfully with a child on school assignment needs understanding of the child’s developmental abilities. It is quite usual for parents to expect a child to remain quiet and still while doing learning activities, but research has proven that brains function better when movement is part of the learning process. Most children require some movement every fifteen or twenty minutes or so to concentrate. Making movement, a part of the activity is an immense way to inspire most advantageous learning and also interest and joy in learning.

If parents try to put movement into the activity and had also made an attempt to capitalize upon child’s natural gift for wonder and fun, they can present the activity to child as a game. By doing so he would not only have been overjoyed to practice his spelling words, he would also learn them more speedily and parents can have had a good time too. For instance, parents can keep the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in different places around the room and each time a child wrote the correct spelling of a word, he would have been allowed to get a piece of the puzzle. When all of the pieces were collected this way, he could put the puzzle together. The time he would spend assembling the puzzle would not only be his reward for learning and writing the correct spelling, it would be a rest break for him before starting the next learning activity.

Parents can persuade child’s efforts to work without help. Most often, in their aspiration to help their child achieve good education and relatively best scoring in the schools, parents set the bar too high, anticipating more from their children than their capability is reasonable under the circumstances. If expectations are unrealistic, children practice failure more than they carry out success. They learn to avoid learning lessons rather than to take pleasure in their achievements. Parents can easily help children to draw a plan for how to learn and remember the spelling words. The plan can comprise writing each word five times while spelling it out loud as the child walked around the room, mobilizing his whole brain for learning by integrating movement into the activity. The next step in the plan could be a test of the words while the child balanced on one foot (weird as it sounds, research reasserts that students devote better attention when engaging in balancing activities). And the plan can also include a five to ten minute break (maybe to compose a puzzle) after finishing the test. Similar exercises and plans can be formulated for making children learn other things like mathematics, science or general knowledge.

Developing independent work habits sets aside a child to feel like a flourishing learner. The feeling of success advocates more focus and commitment towards the studies in the children. Parents can help their child mainly by evidently showing confidence in their ability to succeed. Children who are motivated to believe in success are much more liable to persist when the going gets sturdy. They do not become deterred by minor setbacks. They understand and find it easier to control the situation, and get over from the setbacks if any, in shorter times and they have in their educational experience.

One characteristic of independent work habit is learning effective time management skills. Helping children develop effective time management skills improves their grades and gives them the chance to spend more time with their family and friends. Parents could supervise the amount of time a child gives to each task. For instance, a mother can tell her child that he has thirty minutes to practice spelling words, and if he gets at least 90 percent in the practice test, then he can use two hours for an activity of his choice like reading story books, solving puzzles, or any sports activity, this way a child will feel rejuvenated and he will easily accept and complete the task you want him to do.

Parents can work more successfully with children by integrating movement and fun into homework activities and by formulating strategies and procedures for management of homework. When parents take a child’s leanings into consideration in teaching independent work habits to him, the environment of the home is improved and both parents and kids have fun and get pleasure in doing schoolwork and homework.

Teachers and parents both need to work together to assist children in pursuing a well-balanced lifestyle. The matter of school performance should be kept separate from other activities of a child’s life. If teachers and parents both, promote quality education, a strong sense of involvement with the kids, and encourage their performance with positive reinforcement, a well-balanced lifestyle can be maintained.

EFFECTIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES FOR STUDENTS

Every student aims at achieving their level best to perform well during their tenure of  educational studies, yet the number who knows the tactics to learn more by studying less , which can further get  them good grades is very low. These few students who make it happen successfully are not only the smarter ones; rather they are the students who accurately know how to learn things in a better way and how to get better grades by understanding them. Learning is a severe task and if you are in a class with a lot of other students, learning can also turn into a competitive job. Our wish for being at top doesn't let us feel happy with simple success in school examinations only, To a certain extent we all try to reach at the top and get best possible grades or the things we want from our life.

Any child can easily get better marks in his or her school examination by undertaking the better learning strategies that enables them to optimize their learning capacities and make the most beneficial use of their hard work / labour / energy. It is not necessary that a student should become a bookworm, in order to succeed at school. A lot of students who constantly keep in touch with their books to memorize the formulae, theories and problem solving methods often fail to get better marks in the exams. This is for the reason that they keep on trying to memorize, too many things behind the different topics and subjects, devoid of interconnecting the ideas which restricts them to learn and understand the things practically.

A student might score average marks if he or she try hard to memorize things.  However, if any student really wants to excel in his studies and to earn the highest marks in his exams, he needs to play smart and intelligent. Memorizing things is not the right procedure; instead one should try to make his or her mind active enough to make learning process simpler than, it is for the majority of the students. With better learning strategy, one can save more time and gain confidence. This will let students participate in his or her social life and to get pleasure from other streams of learning like sports and leisure activities.

Proper Learning Strategy

In lieu of putting away yourself with books like a bookworm and attempting to memorize every word of the book devoid of in reality understanding it, you need to pursue the holistic approach of learning. Rather than wasting your energies in attempting to rote memorizes everything referred in your curriculum; you should begin making association between the ideas. There are several definite strategies to learn things in a simple way.

Where to Study? The conventional or standard perception has it that one should continue with one study place, which is not right. Cognitive researchers have laid down that shifting locations for study purposes makes better retention in the students.

Focus: It is broadly assumed that one should focus strongly on a single topic, research points, contrarily, that changing the type of material studied in single sitting ensues in far better learning results than does concentrating on just one subject at a time.  Mix and match with your subjects, as if you constrict your focus of study too much, you will never develop the mental hooks that the brain requires to solve the problems.

Tests are good for learning: Tests are immense learning tool. Libraries, teachers or professors generally have copies of past tests question papers in a subject matter. Try to find them and start practicing with them, practicing in this way will give you knowledge about the type of questions asked in the examination and the pattern of examination. It will really help you solve your question paper easily and will save much of your time in examination hall.  Complicated tests are even more efficient learning tools. Researchers call this learning outcome "desirable difficulty".

Explicate hard concepts to yourself or somebody else. While trying to getting mastery over something it often helps if you explain it to somebody else, which will make the topic clearer to you.

Don't solve problems on your own for the first time, study problems that already have been solved.

Can Exercise Make Kids Smarter? The answer is yes. Being fit increases neurocognition. To do well on tests, one should always keep fit, as the saying goes “a healthy mind dwells in a healthy body.” Kids could play healthy games – puzzles, educational toys or even a twenty minute walk prior to a test will help bring up test scores.