We’ve now spent 2 entire days combing through the malls and dark alleys for deals on back to school items for our girls. I’ve had enough! I feel as if I’m hung-over from a night of booze, dancing and all that follows those kinds of nights. We got home around 11 pm last night, pockets empty, energy drained and children still bitching that they didn’t get all they wanted. Too freaking bad!

Every year, around August and September, parents of young children face one of their largest single expenses: getting their kids ready for a new school year. They extend their budget for children’s clothes and school supplies, forgetting to plan ahead in the process.

Unfortunately, this expensive annual tradition has not been adapted to a time when there are more single parents and, in general, less money in the average family budget. That’s why it is more important at this time to be an informed shopper than ever.

Start by taking a thorough inventory of what you already have, and develop a budget for what you still need. Then, list each item in priority, from most important to least important. By having a prioritized, budgeted shopping list, it can be trimmed easily by cutting from the bottom.

The next step is to compare prices of different items. If a store five miles away is offering low prices on blue jeans, it may be worth the drive. Buy underwear, socks and other basics in quantity when they are on sale, making sure to allow for growth. Check as many newspaper advertisements and catalogs as possible before you finally make your purchases.

Another important strategy is to remember that what you buy is as important as how you buy. Basic, durable clothing will stretch your dollars significantly. Check for strong buttonholes, secure buttons, reinforced stitching, firmly woven or knitted fabric, and basic styles.

Some important things to remember about back-to-school shopping:

Children grow quickly. Look for articles of clothing with no definite waistline, like overalls. Blouses and shirts with long tails, as well as pants with elastic waistbands, also allow for kids to grow. Make shorts out of long pants, and short sleeves out of long sleeves, as your child grows. Also, straight-knit dresses make great tops for jeans, stretch pants, or skirts.

Kids like ‘easy’ clothes. For younger children, getting the best value for your dollar means buying clothes they like to wear. Look for articles they can manage without much help. For example, front openings, flat buttons, easy-to-reach pockets, elastic waistbands, and large necklines make it easier for kids to get dressed in the morning. Remember, the easier it is for them to dress themselves, the less stressful your mornings will be.

Save on school supplies. Before you run to the “Back To School” section at an expensive retailer, compare prices with lower priced outlets and office supply stores. You might find that the spiral notebook with the really colorful cover is more expensive and has less paper than the one with the plain cover.

Shopping for school clothes and supplies also gives parents a great opportunity to teach their older kids about spending habits. Sit down with your children and decide on a budget. Let them do the comparison shopping and point out that if they get the expensive sneakers, they have to cut back in other areas. Not only will they learn about smart shopping, they will value what you buy for them much more.

The most important strategy for Back To School shopping is to stick to the budget you set. Bring only as much cash as you need, based on your budget, and leave your credit cards at home (you’d think I would know this by now) . Shopping for less is a challenge, but with planning and forethought, you can prepare your children for another school year without breaking the family budget.

BTW, when I grow up I want to own a Hollister or Abercrombie store… that place is a magnet for teens and dungeon for parents alike. Quite honestly, this must be the “crack” of the new generation. EVERY friggin teen and their poor parents were in those stores!

I apologize if I offended any nerds gifted kids with the title

After reading an article online this morning (see below for the article) about the research that’s going into finding out if traditional schooling is keeping back our children, it had me thinking. We have 3 girls who are really into the use of technology (computers, cell phones, ipods etc), they love the fact that information is constantly a click away.   Should we be looking at other ways to school our children.

I’d love to hear your comments…

EDMONTON (CP) -
Dean Bennett - Researchers question traditional schooling model in high-tech age

Why, in the Information Age, are students heading back to classrooms?

Researchers say students weaned on collaborative learning with high-tech devices are suffering in classrooms ruled by defenders of lecture-based orthodoxy wielding overhead projectors and reciting from dog-eared history textbooks that climax with Paul Martin’s run for 24 Sussex Drive.

“It’s not about using technology for technology’s sake. It’s allowing students to access the right information because of the information explosion,” says Mohamed Ally, director of the Centre for Computing and Information Systems at Athabasca University, Alberta’s distance-learning pioneer.

Ally is among a group of researchers across Canada looking at how to overhaul a method of teaching that, in some ways, has not fundamentally advanced in hundreds of years.

“It’s pre-Gutenberg,” says Don Tapscott, futurist, lecturer and author of bestsellers such as “Wikinomics,” laughing as he recalls the assessment he heard from a university president.

“It’s a prof working from handwritten notes. The students are all writing it down and the prof is writing on a blackboard. The assumption of the printing press is not even a fundamental part of the learning paradigm.”

Dentists, doctors and other professionals asleep for 100 years would awake, he says, to a world where they would not recognize their jobs, much less perform them. But in education, a teacher could walk into a classroom after a century and get busy.

“There’s a huge generational clash that’s happening in the universities and schools,” said Tapscott.

Students, he suggests, forced to line up at the photocopier to run off reams of paper off reading lists wonder why the professor just doesn’t set up links to websites containing the material.

“The entire model of pedagogy is wrong for young people,” he said.

Students who interact on the web, talk to each other digitally to resolve questions, post to the web and blog on the web are going to have problems adapting to sitting, listening, then regurgitating on an exam the words of one person standing at the front of the room, he said.

Ally notes that the sheer speed of information change makes textbooks, such as those in computing, outdated not in years but months.

“The read-and-remember and the listen-and-remember is kind of an old paradigm because information is changing at such a fast rate,” said Ally.

He said the marriage of distance learning at institutions like Athabasca University with technology means the future is limited only by the imagination.

Consider, he says, a future where:

- Other countries could deliver courses to students in Canada. A student living in Calgary could graduate from a high school in Bonn.

- Software can detect ways in which a student learns and can tailor course material to those strengths: more examples if a student learns by example or more graphics if a student excels that way.

- Students continue to work together for much-needed social interaction, but advance according to outcome-based models rather than the age-based cohorts of Grades 1, 2, 3, etc.

- Teachers aren’t in the classroom but are available to assist peer-to-peer learning or online to answer questions and give guidance.

Ally is helping to pioneer delivering course work tailored for mobile use on PDAs, iPhones, iPods and the like.

The goal is to free a student from the classroom. A student will be able to complete their course work while travelling the world or just sitting in an airport.

“They will do their reading on the mobile device, and in some cases they can actually take test questions and get immediate feedback.”

Tapscott knows how he thinks the future should look: “Every kid has a laptop. They’re clustered into groups. It’s self-based interactive, student-focused, collaborative learning.”

If so, then the future appears to be now at a pilot project beginning this year at Edmonton’s St. Mary Elementary School.

About 100 Grade 5 and 6 students in four classes will be equipped with tablet PCs. With those detachable screens, they will be free to move about the wireless facility, doing homework or researching on the web in, say, the gym or library. Should learning stop because there’s a system crash, IT staff are on site to get the students back online.

In the classroom, their desks are arranged in clusters to foster peer-to-peer and group problem-solving through a variety of tools like Smart Boards and LCD screens.

“We’re not trying to get the technology to replace everything. We want it to be as an additional resource that helps student learning,” said Joe Estephan, the teacher of the tablet PC Grade 6ers.

“Technology is the future and we need to catch up, and students are highly motivated when it comes to technology.”

Ally and Tapscott say the challenge is not the technology.

“The biggest wall we have to knock down is the attitude of the teachers and some of the faculty to get them to actually use the devices,” said Ally. “Some of them, because they’ve been in the system a long time, are kind of afraid to move toward the technology.”