The Joy Of Learning

Teach your children how to handle money

Well, every day our children and youth are bombarded with a million different images and voices, everything ads from billboards to internet telling them who they are and influencing them to measure their worth by what they have. The peer pressure and the pressure to be accepted drives them, and perhaps even their parents, to throw money away on things that don’t matter, all in an attempt to be somebody. The result? We are raising a generation that spends money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t even like!

Over 80% of undergraduates in America have at least one credit card and nearly 50% of college graduates carry 4 or more credit cards. According to the Department of Education, the average balance carried by these students is more than $3,000!

These statistics show that many children aren’t being taught how to handle money. Many young adults do not know how to read a bank statement nor balance the check book, but they have a checking account or own several credit cards. That’s why we see more young people are making mistakes with many zeros at the end of them. These mistakes often take years to overcome. Teach your children how to handle money while they are young, and they won’t make mistakes later on in life.

Resource center for academic writing

Academic writing is very different from any kind of writing, you need to follow certain format and you need to write in passive voice! For sciences, you need to write as the third person to remain or at least to sound objective. :-)

If you are taking up a graduate study and need to learn about academic writing, you may want to check out the Capella Writing center, it has a wide variety of one-page handouts in PDF format for downloading on topics such as developing a thesis statement, writing in the third person, and plagiarism. The Writing Center is setup by Capella university, an online university that offers online university degree courses since 1993.

This blog post is based on information provided by Blogitive. For more information, please visit Blogitive.com.

Parents, get involve in your child’s activities

It’s a known secret that children with parents who are involved in their lives are more well-adjusted and fair better at their educational and extracurricular pursuits. Parental involvement is an integral part that helps them in their cognitive development, keeps them motivated, strengthens the parent-child relationship, and has a direct positive influence on their overall academic achievement.

But how do you get involved? Most parents nowadays are busy at work, juggling between work, family and school. It’s not uncommon that an average family has very little quality time to offer. However, with some careful planning and dedication, you can make it a positive experience for both yourself and your child. You can find out what your child is most passionate about. Then you can think of contributing your time to volunteer or getting actively involved in her school activities .

In fact, by being involved with your child, it helps you to stay connected with your child. As children who have involved parents are less likely to get into mischief and disciplinary problems in school, or have emotional problems, then you have a win-win situation !

Have you started any vacation arrangement?

It’s already end of May, how far have you prepared for your holiday vacation trips with the whole family? Have you done any vacation arrangement?

As prices of gas continues to rise and inflation is going on a double digit, many families are probably on a shoestring budget and would settle for domestic or local trips instead of traveling oversea. If you are planning to go somewhere, you’d better start planning right now, look for cheap hotels and discounted entrance tickets online is one way to save money!

Most of us are probably going to do all the advance booking with a credit card. With the gloomy economy roaming around, most of us would try to save a buck here and there. It doesn’t make sense to pay annual fees or subscription fee for a credit card, especially when they are plenty of credit cards no annual fee available. Most of the banks offer some kind of credit cards which you can earn cash rebate, miles and gas rewards, which allow you to accumulate some points for your next trip. If you do not have one that gives you such privilege, check out the Capital One MasterCard!

Develop reading habits in children

Most parents who love to read want their children to also love reading. With most children nowadays prefer watching TV and playing computer games than reading, instilling the love of reading can be a challenging task. Here are some good practices if you are serious about developing reading habits in your children.

First of all, collect and surround your children with good books.  Your collection must consist of a variety of books with different themes and with colorful and attractive pictures. Allow them to choose the books they are interested in.

The next thing in developing their love and skills in reading is to read aloud the books of their choice.  Other than stories, you can also read a lot of books with facts to draw them into the wonderful world of knowledge and of course to broaden their understanding of the world around them.

Children who are underachieving

Being lazy and dumb are the two labels for students with poor grades ever since time immemorial. Parents and sadly many teachers are led to accept these as the reasons for poor academic performance. In actual fact, many children with considerable academic ability fail at subjects in which they should succeed. That’s why one often see on school reports these dreaded stereotyping comments such as ‘Not working to potential’, ‘Lazy’, or worse still, ‘Dumb’ but in disguised terms.

Why they are so many children work below their capacity? Underachieving is not a simple problem and should certainly be a matter of great concern for parents and the education system.

They are two types of situations under achievements are often identified. The first is where children only achieve on occasions when the mood takes them. It seems when an emotional crisis erupts: a relationship breaks up; a family crisis; a personality clash with a teacher, all these can trigger their refusal to work or put themselves forward.

The second situation is potentially much more serious. The child may have many characteristics that give him a label hard to remove. They may become aggressive, giving vent to their frustration by causing trouble or they may become sulky and withdrawn and refuse to develop their talent.

Sadly, over eighty percent of identified underachievers are boys! Studies within the western world’s education and cultural setting even indicated a range of 25-75% among these under achievers are are actually gifted children!

Generally, these children have few long-term problems if they can get immediate help to overcome their difficulty and their progress at school is closely monitored. In the western world, there have started some boarding schools cater the teens with this aim, to help the many underachieving children from fallen victim to the expectations of society and of their families.

Concern about socialization aspect of homeschooling

Many parents were concern about the aspect of socialization when it comes to homeschooling their children. They are afraid that homeschooling environment will provide limited interaction, which is detrimental to the growth and development of a child.

Generally, homeschooled children get individual attention thus are more aware of the implications and the purpose of their learning. They are encourage to be inquisitive, trained to ask intelligent questions and make careful and correct observations. They see what what and how their parents conduct themselves, thus begin their life by imitating their parents. In another word, they are protected from the detrimental influences of their peers.

Whereas children are often put into a fiercely competitive environment in public schools, which they are not encouraged to work cooperatively. What kind of social skills are we talking about and what kind of interaction do you get in this kind of environment?

Organizing educational tours

It’s never an easy task to organize an educational tour, it needs careful planning for a balance of educational travel experiences and cultural activities, combined with recreational opportunities. The educational travel components can be thematic or the content can be chronologically arranged, which essentially aim to provide participants with a well-rounded cultural and educational travel experience.

Most school won’t have enough resources to organize such a tour. In most cases, it’s better to hire the professional to do the job. They are many companies like Hemisphere Travel that are specialized in organizing educational US tours and educational tours around the world for students. They can organize the tour according to the precise cultural and educational requirements of your student tour group based on the dates, themes and destinations of your choice, and the specific goals for your educational student tour.