How Important Is Child Education Plan in India?

Every parent earns and invests for the betterment of their family. One of the most important responsibilities is to plan for their child's education in advance. In India the education expenses are rising with every passing year making them worry for their kid's future. Only proper planning can help them in getting their child admitted to the desired course. When we say proper planning it does not mean just saving money, but can also be investing in different finance options like in child education plan or mutual funds to get good returns when required. Child education plan in India is emerging as a great trend for investment which gives higher returns and can be utilized for funding higher studies for children.

Nowadays many private insurance companies have come up with some excellent child education plan in India, which is low cost in running and give higher returns when required. Different plans will give different results; hence parents should compare and check plan's performance from time to time before investing. It is good that in India more parents are planning for their children's higher education rather than waiting for the situation to become worse. Financial awareness is spreading and more options are being provided by different companies to invest and save for a secured future.

Apart from these child plans, there are different types of investment options also available in the market, which are much cheaper and give higher returns like fixed deposits, investing in government securities, mutual funds and market linked insurance plans. Earlier child education plans were high cost in running and gave less benefit as compared to all these investment options. Recently launched child education plans are much more flexible, performing really well and are giving enough returns making it possible for many children to think and dream big about their higher studies. The most important things to keep in mind before investing should be your goals, current financial situation and percentage of returns in the future. Other important factors include tax, time frame and flexibility of the plan. And, all these features are best provided by the child's education plans today. Before investing in any of these options, one should research and compare all the features in detail with the various finance options available. The prime factor remains getting the cash when required in times like admission and travelling abroad for higher studies.

by Kirti_saxena

Child Education: Are Your Children Scoring Poor Grades?

Child education is important for successful future. Hence it is natural to feel worried when our children do not perform well in studies. It is even more natural to glare, scold and shout at them.

But all these actions don't really help to improve children's education. More probably, it will just add to their tensions and problems.

So exactly, what can you do if your children come home with poor report card?

Support. Encourage. Motivate. These are the key words to help children improve their performance.

Also, here are 6 simple education tips to bring faster improvement in your children:

Child Education Tip 1: Don't Attach Negative labels

Do not label your children with degrading titles like: "Stupid," "Lazy," and other negative names which create poor self-image. Firmly believe that your children are capable of achieving anything they really desire.

Child Education Tip 2: Identify Your Children's Problem

Children who don't perform well in studies have some problems. These problems can be solved if identified. To identify problems, observe your children closely and ask them questions. Here are examples of some common problems of children:

• Complaining about classmates/teachers

• Coming from school tired and irritated

• Good in one subject but not in another

• Slow reading and understanding of study material

• Avoiding homework until the last minute

• Finding it difficult to interact with other children and adults

• Spending time on unimportant activities

• Learning little or nothing in class

• Problems with eyesight or hearing

• Not enthusiastic in going to school

• Being disobedient and/or sulky

Once you identify your children's problem related to education, it will become easy for you to think and find solutions for it.

Child Education Tip 3: Puff up Your Children's Self-Confidence

This is one of the best ways to improve your children's performance. Search for some good study habits or skills of your children and talk about it.

No matter how poorly your children are performing right now, there might be some topic or study skill in which they are good.

For example, your son might be good in spelling, or reading or drawing diagrams. Your daughter might be good in math or biology or in remembering formulas. Think about it and praise your children for their good education skills.

Also, search for some education related achievements of your children in the past and discuss it with them. For example, perhaps your son had got 'good' remarks on his science report. Or perhaps your daughter had scored better grades in some subjects last year, or even year before that.

Discuss such past education related success. Remind your children about their achievements, however small it is. This will shift your children's mental focus on their good study skills and on their 'education success.' They will realize that they do have the ability to learn. The power to win.

Tell your children, "If you can learn one thing, you can also learn other things. If you can achieve success once, you can achieve it again." Such words from you will strongly motivate your children to succeed in education.

Child Education Tip 4: Speak With Their Teacher

Meet your children's school or college teachers and discuss your children's performance and education problems with them. Ask them what is wrong with your children, and what you can do to help them improve. Advice and suggestions of teachers will help you immensely.

Child Education Tip 5: Set Achievable Goals

When children have clear goals in their mind, they usually make efforts to study better. Hence encourage your children to set small and reasonable goals for their studies.

For example, if your daughter has scored C grade in math test, she can set a goal to score B grade in next math test. If your son has fallen behind in his History class, then he can set a goal to read two or three history lessons each week, depending upon his speed.

Child Education Tip 6: Keep Your Children Fit

Encourage your children to get some physical exercise like, running, jogging, skipping, cycling, swimming, etc. Exercise improves blood circulation, digestion, and provides more oxygen to brain. This leads to better learning and memory. Ask your children to exercise everyday, or at least five days a week.

Finally, remember what Edison's mother did!

Thomas Edison was labeled as "slow learner" by his teachers. But his mother, Nancy Edison, did not accept her son as 'dull.' She motivated, encouraged, and taught Edison to learn at his own speed and style. And we all know what Edison went on to achieve in his life as a scientist!

by Preeti Narayan

10 Tips for Making Stress-Free School Lunches

One of last year's lunches

I always say that I don’t mind making school lunches, but the truth is, I hate it. In fact, I hate it so much that I’ve forced myself to become so efficient at making them that it’s no longer that bad.

And I am here to say that you too can hate it so much that you become a lunch-making wizard, freed from the discouragement, feet-dragging, dread and boredom that the sight of an empty lunchbox or two can bring.

Here are a few of my tried-and-true tricks for banishing lunchbox burnout, which we all know can occur long before the first day of school:

1.    Start prepping now. And I mean NOW. Today. Get your ducks in a row, mama; September is right around the corner and if you need supplies, they’ll be gone by then. (Ever try buying a snowsuit in December? It’s like that.) Take stock of your lunch making kit. Is it age appropriate? In good shape? In compliance with school guidelines? Still safe, healthy and clean enough to use? Now’s the time to figure that out.

2.    If you are buying a new kit, I am totally assuming that you are buying an eco-friendly, litterless lunch kit, because, honestly, why wouldn’t you? There are a ton of amazing products on the market and no excuse to brown bag/plastic bag it. I’m sorry, there’s just not. 

3.    You need to love the lunch kit(s) you buy. YOU are the one making the lunches, so the kit has to jibe with your style of food prep/organization, and offer at least a tiny bit of inspiration.

4.    Get the right lunch kit for your child. My kids have different kits, but I love them both. I have already raved about my older daughter’s Planet Box lunch kit, and I still love it, but felt it wasn’t quite right for my new kindergartener’s kit. It’s a bit heavy and my four year old has a tendency to eat everything in front of her, so I worried that if I didn’t ‘parcel out’ the food in a more separate way, she’d finish her food for the entire day at first break. For my four year old, we bought the Balanced Day Eco-Pack,  with divided, very easy to open containers. They fit pretty well (though not perfectly) in a Crocodile Creek lunch bag that we already had, so I didn’t buy the Balanced Day lunch bag. But it’s a good option.

5.    Hit the grocery store, and bring paper and pen. Schedule a trip to the store with your students, but this is not really going to be a grocery-buying mission. This is going to be a lunch-list-making mission. Walk the aisles with your kids, making a list of all the great stuff they would be ok with in their lunch. This will pretty much be your ingredient list for the year, meaning you can always put the things on this list into their lunch. Make sure your kids clearly understand this. It worked really well for us last year, taking the guess work out of the lunch staples, and I will be doing it again this year.

6.    Hit the internet. Do the same exercise while browsing lunch-making posts, pinterest and recipe sites. Turns out my kid will a hard-boiled egg, or a cream-cheese and jam sandwich, as long as the sandwich is cut into a cute shape. I’m ok with that.

7.    Do a lunchtime trial run. This is especially important for the kindies that may have never eaten lunch at school before, but if you’ve upgraded lunch kits for an older child, it’s also a good idea. The last thing you want to hear is that your child could not open their container, or that their water bottle leaked or that they actually prefer their food really cold and you need another ice pack. The goal is to reduce heartache, work and anxiety, yanno?

8.    Start cooking today. Yes, now, weeks ahead of schedule. Because things like mini-muffins, breakfast muffins, pancakes, and soup freeze really well, and will take up a coveted spot in the bento box come September. I batch cook items like this every couple of weeks, ensuring that I always have a few easy items ready for the lunch box.

9.    Once school starts, make lunch the night before. Seriously. Every night. It is a life saver. Unless you are one of those ‘morning people’ that wake up an hour before their kids and have oodles of goodwill and energy before 7am, this is a step you should not skip. (I do little more than grunt at people and hide in my coffee cup that early in the morning.) Mornings are crazy enough without having to make lunches, no?

10. Label EVERYTHING. You know every parent’s good friend, Mabel, right? She is there for you. Because you’ve put a ton of money, energy and thought into these lunches, and when your kid leaves it in the playground on the first day of school, or somebody grabs the wrong water bottle in the lunch room, you want it to come back to you. (p.s. don’t just label the big part of the container; the lid needs a label, too.)

Bonus tip: Put a little note in there, would ya? The lunch was made with love, but a little heart sticker or I heart you on a napkin is about the sweetest thing you could include.

***

Education for Sustainable Development for Child Education and Schools

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a rather new field of education. We can see it as an innovative kind of future education for schools linking the child's development with the future challenges of society.

I don't think that education for sustainable development is just another buzzword forgotten in a few years. From a global perspective as well as a local perspective we have to direct education toward what will be truly useful for each child and for each society in the future.

To have a fulfilling life should be within reach for all children whereever they are born. In too many parts of society and of the world children grow up in hazardous environments with very poor conditions for basic requirements and bleak prospects for their future.

Education for Sustainable Development is derived from the Brundtland report's focus on Sustainable Development (SD). The Brundtland report requires fundamental changes in the society and its institutions, in politics and in our individual family life styles. Economic development cannot be separated from social development and a concern for the environment.

ESD for child development Educational research can tell us a lot of how to make use of education for sustainable development for child development.

The most important fact might be that ESD is an excellent frame for the empowerment of children. When we respect each individual child for its ideas and opinion, and at the same time bring the child into challenging learning situations we facilitate empowerment of the child.

Developing self esteem and empowerment goes hand in hand in education for sustainable development. A proper self esteem is such an important part of successful child development.

Another important fact is that ESD is a productive frame for meaningful learning. Opposite to rote learning and the acquisition of facts without much understanding meaningful learning situations help the child to engage fully in the teaching. By working with real problems the child can develop much better understanding of concepts and skills from the schools core curriculum in a meaningful context. The key to that is the opportunity to use and reflect on these 'traditional' ingredients of classic schooling in the meaningful contexts derived from the focus on sustainable development.

Education for sustainable development and schools Some schools have focused on the beautification of their school environment. This might help the school's prestige in the local society but it isn't helpful for education for sustainable development unless it happens as the students' project.

Similarly some schools have put a lot of emphasis in making the school buildings more 'green' with solar power panels, recycling systems, water conservation measures and tree planting around the school. Again, such initiatives are only valuable for the learning of the students if they are planned as student projects. You cannot evaluate the quality of a school's work with education for sustainable development from a picture of the school.

Concerning a better approach to ESD, headmaster and teachers should ask questions like: - How can we challenge students' thinking on the future and how to make use of parts of the core curriculum in a meaningful way in combination? - How can we teachers cooperate to create stimulating activities and plan the teaching in such a way that the self-esteem of the students will benefit from it? - How can we help students to investigate local people's concern for the future and how to make sense of such results? - How can we help students to try to make a difference according to their wishes and visions?

Education for sustainable development will gain increasing publicity as the picture of environmental degradation, energy shortage, climate change, increasing poverty mixed with increasing wealth and the overall picture of globalization becomes more evident.

We cannot blame our children for these issues but it is our duty to educate them to be able to cope with such complex and controversial issues and to live a decent life with a belief that it is possible for everybody to make a difference to the better.

by Soren Breiting

BlogHer '12: A Totally Meta Recap

I could have titled this post, Karen Went to BlogHer and All She Got Was Some Creative and Possibly Existential Angst, but a) that wouldn’t be entirely accurate, and b) if I learn nothing else from social media conferences, it’s that SEO seems to be really important, and there is exactly none in that title.

I went to my second BlogHer – it would have been my third but I had to ditch on San Diego at the last minute because we decided to move to the country on a whim that month – and it was very different from my first BlogHer experience in 2010. I knew it would be, of course – same city, same hotel, but that’s about all that’s remained the same since 2010. I have changed, and blogging has changed. And BlogHer has changed.

In 2010, I was a Voice of the Year keynote speaker – pretty amazing, and pretty insane for my first BlogHer experience. I was 100% completely dedicated to the conference – to being on that stage, to attending the sessions, to wringing every last ounce of bloggy goodness I could out of the experience. I barely noticed I was in New York City, and I came home inspired, motivated and enriched as a blogger.

Two years later, and I am not that same blogger. And BlogHer was not that same conference for me.

In the past two years, my writing life has changed. I have given up my full-time copywriting job to be a freelance writer and to finally write a novel. We moved to a small town partly so that I could do this. I am dedicated to this pursuit, and work at it everyday. To the detriment of my blogging.

Or perhaps my blogging is to the detriment of writing.

BlogHer was supposed to help me re-establish my passion for blogging, or at least, to help me reconnect with it. In one way, it did – I am completely nourished by the social density of BlogHer.

Many will complain that BlogHer was too big this year, and logistically, I suppose that argument could be made: I didn’t make it in to several sessions I wanted to because of capacity crowds; line-jumpers at the Martha Stewart lunch set off my heated sense of injustice and Canadian do-goodism; the literal heaving of the dance floor at Sparklecorn had me moving into slight panic-attack territory when I thought the whole place was going to fall crashing to the second story below it. But otherwise, I am ok with crowds, and more people at the conference meant more people to meet, more friends to see again or for the first time.

I am a people person, so the volume of people was not an issue for me.

But while it was easy to find friends and meet new ones, it was decidedly more difficult to find sessions that I wanted to attend. Crossing one session after another off the list, I was confronted again and again by the feelings that have been brewing for the past two years: I am at a blogging stalemate.

I’ve been blogging since the end of 2005. I’m a veteran, but I have never moved into celebloggger status, happy to bob along in my anti-A-type way. I know a lot of people because I’ve been doing this a long time, but I have never aspired to any sort of status as a blogger beyond being known as a decent writer.

I don’t want to win the internet. I want to win a Pulitzer.

To that end, I am a writer. Is blogging writing? That is a question for another post, but going to BlogHer, I was looking for something to help me enrich my writing, not just my blogging stats. The first session I attended was Blogging for the Love of It, which is all I’m doing, seeing as I am totally non-compliant with SEO rules in my personal writing, I have no ads on my blog and have never thought of myself as a brand (barf).

But is blogging for the love of it enough?

I used to say that I started my blog because I wanted my own personal editorial column in my own personal magazine. I do let bare my soul in this space, but I measure my words carefully, for effect and intent. I have had positive feedback and many opportunities have been born out of blogging.

I have been told many times that I am a good writer, and I have loved it, believed it.

(I don’t have to make the disclaimer that all bloggers are narcissists, do I?)

And then, earlier this summer, I attended an intensive writing workshop with some of Canada’s best and most accomplished authors, and some of Canada’s best and most promising young writers. And I had to rethink everything I thought I knew about myself as a writer.

I learned that I needed to murder my darlings; that I needed to put every word on trial as if for its life and that I desperately needed to invest in the economy of language. In order to be a successful writer, which is all I really want, I need to basically stop doing everything that blogging allows, encourages and rewards me for doing.

Try writing a blog post with no adjectives. It’s bloodyhard.

Yes, blogging exercises the writing muscles, and even my mentor at the workshop told me not to stop, that all writing is good, but all writing will not lead me where I ultimately want to be.

Blogging is completely self-indulgent. We do not need to edit, we do not need to carefully control our language, we do not need to agonize over each word in order for it to be ‘good enough.’ We receive praise, heaps of praise, because we relate and do not critique. We encourage and support and that is important, that is so unbelievably important for therapy and for community and for our heart and for our soul.

But is it good for writing? For my own writing and my own writing goals?

I was desperate for sessions that helped me deal with my meta angst and looked for them among the plethora of choices. Not surprisingly, I didn’t find the session entitled, Why Am I Still Doing This? but I’ll suggest it for 2013.

I ended the conference with the #Blog2012 session, which was about as close as one could come to answering such a question.

In the end, I enjoyed BlogHer ’12 immensely. Felt privileged, even as a Canadian, to be addressed by President Obama; enjoyed unapologeticMartha; was part of the collective uncomfortable cringe when Malaak Compton-Rock froze onstage; met and reconnected with seriously amazing women.

Was that enough? I’m not sure. Tickets go on sale for BlogHer ’13 in a month’s time. I’ll see what I’ve figured out by then.

***

BlogHer '12: A Recap in Pictures

Working on a much more introspective post about BlogHer, blogging, and writing in general. But that my friends, is for a day with more coffee and less post-BH burnout.

For now, please to enjoy.

View from the Official Canadian Party
(Also: proof that in the exact perfect circumstances,
a Blackberry can take a decent picture.)

Bone marrow the size of my arm @ Minetta Tavern

I love NY, @emma_willer & @scarbiedoll

Roomies. Felt a bit crowded once Darth and Kirk moved in.

Lower East Side

Kicking off the conference with a live address from
President Obama

Martha Stewart being unapologetically Martha

Lisa Stone & Katie Couric

@candacedx @boredmommy

@scarbiedoll @mamanongrata @emmawaverman

#blog2012 with @neilochka @lauriewrites @schmutzie
(proof that I in fact made it to a few sessions)

Photo-bombing The Pioneer Woman
(Which I then felt compelled to tell her I had done.
So really, I should have just asked her for a photo.)

***

Benefits of Child Education

Education is extremely important for a child's success. The process of education needs to begin from an early age as the success of the a child depends upon how seriously he or she is involved in the process of learning. Extra-curricular activities are as important as academics as it helps the child to learn better.

With various programmes offered by the government, different talents of children such as painting, dancing, theatre, and sports could ultimately turn into their career and create revelations for them, if it is encouraged by the parents at the right time. If the parents put in a sufficient amount of effort to help build the career of their children, it will also benefit the future of the nation.

Why Is Child Education Important?

Early childhood education creates a solid foundation for further learning in school and so on. It is important for the future of a child, as they need to be modeled for what they want to do when they grow up. This encourages them to discover and develop their skills. It is through education that children will open their minds to a wider world and connect with what is happening around them at a much deeper level. It also helps them to realize the standard of living and sustain it. Children all over the world need to be educated so that they will make the right choices in the present and in the future. Child education provides children with the skills and knowledge, which will help them to prosper later in their lives.

When education is started in the early stage in the life of a child, recent studies have shown that it enhances motivation and the learning power lasts for a longer period of time. It trains children to maintain a healthy and productive existence and eventually grow into disciplined and responsible adults.

It will also boost their self confidence and improve their thinking skills along with transacting qualities such as re-silence. Child education is necessary for strong economic development.

Child education is extremely important for a brighter future for your child. Hence it is important that parents also realise the importance of education planning. With programmes like iGenius and education loans, you can start taking initiatives and making plans to secure the future of your child.

Children all over the world need to be educated so that they will make the right choices in the present and in the future. Extra-curricular activities are as important as academics as it helps the child to learn better.

by Kirti Saxena