The dreaded back to school season is back ... soon the kids will be heading off back to school, much to the disappointment of every dad's wallet. New uniform, stationary, books and sports equipment can be enough to put your bank account seriously in the red, especially if you have more than one child to buy for. So we've put together a few hints and tips on how to lower the costs (and the stresses) of buying back-to-school stuff for your kids.

1) Get Organised
If you find a good deal on some items, or come across them in a sale later on in the year then buy them in a bigger size for the start of next years term. In between the start of the new school term and Christmas there will be sales on uniform because retailers will be left with stock that they will want to get rid of before the Christmas rush.

2) Trade with Other Parents

Great talk by Rowan Simpson about lies, lying and cheating. Very entertaining and a gentle reminder for all of us parents to take the higher ground with our children and not just follow old traditions and the beaten path of social conventions.

Enjoy,

Stefan

Here's another project from our friends at makeitruby.com - make a personalised canvas beach bag! Join the movement & design your own beach tote bag. A canvas tote bag is an environmentally friendly alternative to paper or plastic.

What you need: canvas tote bag, fabric paint, washable glitter paint, fabric markers

1. Pick a canvas bag you like (you can buy them in crafts & materials shops, fabric stores, some conveniences stores etc)
2. Decorate your tote with words, phrases & drawings that SCREAM you.
3. Trace over your design with a washable glitter paint to make it sparkle

Done!

By MakeItRuby.com

Did you know 80 per cent of children’s learning happens visually? So being able to focus clearly on the blackboard, computer screen and school books is crucial to your child’s development. Did you also know that an estimated one in five New Zealand primary school children may have an undiagnosed eye condition stopping them from doing just that?

Oamaru optometrist and EYEPRO professional, Brian Denny, says nearly 100,000 Kiwi kids have vision-related learning difficulties which can affect their writing, comprehension of visual information, concentration and behaviour. Current Ministry of Health vision screening for kindergarten and primary school children is not targeted to pick up those other vision problems that can cause a child’s fine motor skills (needed to read and write) to work incorrectly.

One of the things we instil in our children, as a duty to society, is respect for their environment. The dropping of litter has come to symbolize the frontline between those who care and those who couldn’t care less. The other day I saw a man casually discard a cigarette box as he walked along a pavement. I was following behind and I found myself compelled to pick the box up and reproach him about littering the streets. So I said “Excuse me, I think this is yours,’ holding the box up for all to see.

Are you looking for a fun, free and safe online game for your kids that also exposes them to some important values? Well - check out Minimonos.com! MiniMonos is a virtual world for children, focused on sustainability, generosity, community and fun. Children create monkey avatars, decorate their treehouses, and play games—but with a difference. Unlike most virtual worlds, MiniMonos was created to answer a powerful set of questions: What if sustainable living becomes the norm in our lifetimes? What if we reward cooperation instead of consumerism? What if we can change attitudes from the ground up, through our children?

The idea for MiniMonos can be traced back to founder Melissa Clark-Reynolds watching Al Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

Now that the FIFA football worldcup is at a crucial point we thought it's a good idea to show our support for the game by encouraging parents to send their kids to football practice so that future teams have got lots of talented players to send to the world cup :-) This is particularly important for the All Whites, Socceroos and the US team (whatever they are called?!?) as football is sadly not the #1 sport in New Zealand, Australia and the USA. So here's our cheeky list of reasons why parents should send their kids to football practice:

1) Football players make heaps more money than any other sport-pros
2) Unlike Cricket or Curling, Football is not boring ... so having to sit through hundreds of matches watching your little champ play is not going to do your head in

I was somewhat concerned the other day to discover that my eldest son was confused about the difference between astronomy and astrology. It always makes me chuckle when people reveal their belief in astrology as if it were an indication of their intelligence and learning, without realising that it is actually an admission of the exact opposite. For one thing, you only need to believe in something if it doesn’t exist in reality. Nothing truly scientific needs to be believed in for it to exist. If there were no humans left on the planet, science would have no problem carrying on running the show, because it doesn’t exist in the human imagination.

Have you heard of mood charts? If you're a dad that loves his stats and analytical information this is for you (and if you're not that kind of that just try it out anyway). The basic idea of a mood chart is that all family members plot how they are feeling each day on a chart and join the dots (ideally in different colours). Over a month you can see how you've been doing as a family in terms of your emotional state. The chart can be a great conversation starter to ask the kids or your partner why they are feeling the way they do. All you really need is a big piece of paper and a dateline at the top of bottom (which you can easily make by writing all the dates and days of the week for a given period on the chart).

Here in chattering-class England, the subject of head-lice, or nits, is an ongoing saga. You see, it is considered de rigueur for boys to wear their hair middle-length, in contrast with girls who have it long. In point of fact, it is considered rather ‘low rent’ for boys to have very short hair and the reason is snobbery. That is “what the working-class do” according to those in the know, because “boys is boys, and girls is girls.”