October is National Almost Everything Month – Part I
Almost every month has handfuls of National this or that. Here are some of the not-so-slim pickin’s for this month, according to Chase’s Calendar of Events, along with some of my thoughts about how to make the most of them:
– Children’s Magazine Month. As we inch toward the holiday season, consider purchasing subscriptions to magazines for kids on your gift list—instead of toys that will bore kids quickly or fashions that go out of style before your kids rip off the tags. There are shortage of publications to engage all sorts of kids’ interests. You can find Parents Choice Award-winning magazines here.
– National Cyber Security Awareness Month. With all the time kids spend online, you can up the odds that they will surf safely at:
• Wired with Wisdom creates and distributes interactive content through the same media in which kids and adults live their lives.
• Net Smartz is an interactive, educational program of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® that provides resources to help teach children ages 5 to 17 how to be safer on- and offline.
• NS Teens provides resources that empower tweens (ages 8 – 12) to make safer online choices through lessons taught in a series of animated videos highlighting the Internet-related adventures of a diverse cast of teenagers.
– Emotional Intelligence Awareness Month. Emotional intelligence involves self-awareness of your emotions and the ability to sense their impact on other people. It also requires the ability to control your emotions, adapt to changing circumstances. Teaching your kids financial skills and values provides many opportunities to enhance their emotional intelligence. For example, help your kids recognize their response to fads and how advertisements manipulate their desires. Help them identify some of the tricks advertisers use, such as camera angles, small print, product placements in TV shows and movies, making us believe that we need the newest gizmo or that we will be loved and popular by wearing the right designer labels or having minty breath. It can be fun watching TV together more actively, competing to call out and question the premise of the commercials.
Check back next week for a few more national thisses and thats!
