Archive for January, 2011

The Lego Kingdoms King’s Castle is the centrepiece and largest set in the Lego Kingdoms line. A great many of us got our first Lego experience on a Lego castle set (this is only the latest in a venerable line), so no doubt we are anxious for our children to experience feudal Lego fortifications too!

The storyline – such as it is! – revolves around the castle of the good King which is under siege by the bad guys – the evil Dragon Knights. His task is to repel the attack with the help of his best soldiers, making sure of course that the drawbridge is up and the gate shut!
The first time you see the box in the shop it is straight away obvious that this is a MAJOR Lego set – the box is absolutely gigantic. This is the kind of Lego set you get your children once and it keeps them going till college (when you finally get to play with it). When you get the box back and open it this first impression is additionally reinforced by the sheer quantity of the contents. For one thing, as we said earlier, the set has 933 bricks (see below). There are also (slightly overwhelmingly) three different instruction books and initially it was a little challenging for our test subject (an 11-year-old boy) to know how to begin! One minor complaint about the instruction books was that instructions are given entirely in pictures, no written explanations whatsoever!

Sure, this simplifies things for Lego in localising for a variety of countries, but some non-visual types prefer a little in the way of written explanation. No huge issue, just an observation.
But once the build was in full swing, the Kingdoms Castle was logical and fun to assemble and the time seemed to go by in seconds!
The castle will most likely take two kids an bare minimum of several hours to complete (if you actually want them to have fun doing it too and not just finish as quickly as possible for the sake of finishing) but we divided the job between 2 successive bad-weather days. Once the build is finished and you have got over admiring it of course there is more fun to be had, flicking Lego bricks around with the big working catapult!

Of course, the fun doesn’t end there either because your children now have a huge pile of bricks to build other projects with.
The Lego Kingdoms Castle includes the following pieces and figures: the King, the King’s throne, four King’s soldiers, 1 Dragon Knight, 2 Dragon Knight Soldiers, 2 small catapults, 1 large catapult, a secret jailroom, a lowering drawbridge and a wind-up gate.

The kids especially appreciated the action pieces like the drawbridge and portcullis that can be cranked up and down – the catapult we need not even mention..!
If we had to say anything negative about the Lego Kingdoms Castle it might be that some parts of the structure seem a little fragile in construction, bits of the walls in particular can get knocked off perhaps a little too easily. But if your kids can manage that with a well-aimed catapult salvo they are hardly going to complain! Also, you need to take the age limits seriously – with nearly a thousand pieces, many of them small, this is not anything you want falling into the hands of a young child.

However, this is just minor fault-finding – the Lego Kingdoms Castle is a set that no child should be without, that will go on to provide thought-provoking enjoyment years from now.

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It is strange indeed that, in this day of modern science, with everything from space travel to organ transplants, science hasn’t produced an answer to the question of why we require sleep! However , there are several theories, there’s still no definitive, proven answer. All animals are compelled to sleep. If we do not sleep, we ultimately die. Our brains, one theory has it, simply requires it, but the rest of the body feels like it requires it too when we do not sleep. When we have a bad night’s sleep, our strength is diminished and our steadiness is less than best. Some people do quite well on six or seven hours of sleep, while others need nine or ten to avoid that foggy feeling the next day. We rarely think we have had too much sleep, and we can feel when we have not had enough, but there are no hard and fast rules that tell us how much sleep we must have. Each of us discover our sleeping needs as we age.

The sleeping patterns of infants are also variable, but in general they seem to need more sleep than older children. Gradually, their sleeping patterns become more regular, as the baby’s brain synchronizes with the rising of the sun. We fall asleep when our brain senses a buildup of certain chemicals, especially adenosine, produced by our bodies throughout the day. When these chemicals reach a certain level, a part of our brain signals other parts of our brain and body to stop producing other chemicals, such as histamines, which keep us awake. After these ‘stay awake’ chemicals gradually decline, we fall into a light sleep, going in and out of sleep for a short time. Finally, we plunge into deep sleep and our brain activity decreases. The state of deep sleep, however, is interrupted several times throughout sleep, by increased brain activity and rapid eye movement (REM). During the REM periods, we may dream. REM sleep is also associated with the assimilation of our wakeful experiences into our world view. Infants and children have REM sleep more often than deep sleep. REM sleep increases our ability to discern patterns when we’re awake. An infant has much to learn, and so, REM sleep is highest in infancy and early childhood. REM sleep decreases by as much as 50 percent as children enter puberty.

The sleeping patterns of a child are more irregular than that of a teenager. Often, a child’s sleep is interrupted by nightmares, but they rarely suffer from insomnia. In puberty, a teenager is better oriented to the world, more secure, so they suffer less from night terrors than younger kids. With puberty comes psychological and social concerns that occupy a teens thoughts and imagination. They’ve later bed times and so, wake later. Much occupies their minds.

Normal sleeping patterns comes with adulthood. Adult sleep lasts about eight hours and few dreams interrupt the sleep. Disruption of sleep may be caused by the introduction of a new baby in the family, or by work schedule demands. They will sleep regularly, however, unless they are beset by sleeping disorders such as psycho-physical insomnia or sleep apnea.

Elders tend to become sleepy earlier than when they were younger adults. Although more sleep might be best for them, they tend to sleep less and to wake earlier than when they were young. This may reflect their reduced strength and the inevitably shorter life expectancy.

Beyond these general, age-related sleeping patterns, not more can be said. Sleeping patterns vary widely and, unless you’re not getting enough sleep, you have no reason to be concerned if yours differs from your peers. One thing is certain: we all need sleep, from the infant to the elderly. In that much we are the same.

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Learning Schemes For Your Children

The human population learns through various mechanisms. Teaching one child one way will not work equally for everyone. Is it no wonder then that children in school experience varying levels of success? Our school systems are designed to use one overall system and expect to apply it to everyone equally.

The various methods for learning are based on several systems. The first system is based on the “input” of information. For instance, input can be in the form of a book (i.e. by reading), it can be teacher instruction, it can be watching a video, listening to a tape or physically involved (getting your hands dirty).

The modes for input really rely on three possible methods: visual, auditory or kinesthetic.

Visual Learning

People who are visual learn best by watching. For instance watching a video – with lots of images. A lesson plan aimed at teaching children (or adults for that matter) about a country (i.e. Spain) can be delivered several way. Visual students will learn best if during the instruction the information is presented along with images or video of Spain. Learning about Spain will have the biggest positive experience for the visual students because it appeals to their sense of information input.

Auditory Learning

Unlike the visual students, students who are auditory need someone to explain and perhaps describe the lesson to them. For instance, they would learn more about Spain when the teacher takes time to talk about it. Images have little impact. A teacher trying to teach children about Spain should use both visual aids with time describing Spain so that the auditory learners will pick up the information

Kinesthetic Learning

The third group of learners is a less common and unfortunately more difficult group to teach. Kinesthetic learners work by “feeling” their way through material. They are more often the best apprentices because they learn best by touching and feeling their way through the material. In the example with Spain, it might help passing a globe around the classroom and asking students to find Spain on the map.

Identifying the different learners can be an easier task than one might think. For one thing visual learners are fast talkers. That’s because they tend to want to “paint a picture” when explaining things to people. They also use language such as “I see what you’re talking about.”; “I see it now”, etc. Auditory learners talk slow and methodically taking care to express each word. They tend to use auditory language like “I hear what you’re saying.”etc.
In the end a teacher should appeal to each of the learner types by incorporating visual, auditory and kinesthetic methods. Taking the time to learn about each student can better help place students into “learning” groups.

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Treating Minor Burn Injuries

There’s a great number of household items that may cause both minor and severe burn injuries. Actually, burn injuries continue to rank as one of the main reasons for preventable injury every year in the United States.

Although burn injuries are serious enough that the victim will require health-related attention, there are a number of easy and easily available natural home remedies that can be used to deal with minor burns. Using home remedies is a great method to ensure getting quick relief for the pain brought on by burn injuries. Additionally, many natural home remedies can help you injuries heal faster than when they were left alone.

Milk

Milk could be a great home cure for burns and is something that almost everyone has already in their fridge. Milk supplies a quick soothing sensation for burn injuries because of its fat content. The larger body fat content of the milk, the greater soothing it will likely be.

To treat a burn with milk, simply soak a burn (after you’ve cleaned it) in milk for approximately 15 minutes. If this is too difficult, you may also soak a clean rag or washcloth in milk and then place this about the burn.

Cool, NOT COLD, Water

When many people experience a burn injury they immediately head for ice cold water or ice itself. While it appears to make sense that the coldest thing possible within your house would provide the greatest relief for burns, placing ice cold water on the burn can actually kill the skin cells.

As a result, you need to use cool water instead of cold water to sooth a burn injury. Cool water will still provide quick pain alleviation but will not cause any long term harm to your skin.

Aloe

Aloe is well known for its soothing properties on sunburns, along with other burns, as well. If you have an aloe plant in your home, simply cut off a branch at the thick end and rub the gel on your burn. Not simply will aloe provide quick pain relief, but it will even help your burn heal must faster than without it.

Hemorrhoid Cream

Preparation H, or other hemorrhoid cream, is a good method to soothe burns quickly. Developed to lessen swelling and alleviate pain, hemorrhoid cream can help you cope with the pain sensation from the burn injury quickly and effectively.

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There are three (3) key skills that are required for learning. Unfortunately, the education system fails to incorporate this early on in the child’s curriculum.

READING

Yes, reading believe it or not is not taught the way it should. Unfortunately only a segment of the population actually learn to read correctly and those who do are not directly taught the mechanism. They simply acquire it instinctively.

Reading is the input mechanism in which your brain interfaces with the information you are taking in. For a many of us, we are taught as children to read aloud before a class. After completing a paragraph or two the teacher moves on to the next student. Once the child learns to read externally, the next stage of development is to internalize it and start reading “silent”. Unfortunately, for many of us this means “subvocalizing” the words in our head.

Subvocalization causes us to loose a great deal of understanding of the material on hand because it is comprised of extra steps. Steps that the brain must interpret and process along the way. For instance the sentence “The car is driving down the street at 100 miles per hour.” When we subvocalize the words we process each word separately and the brain works to make sense of it. Then there is another step that results in pausing and processing the sentence as a whole which may (or may not) impart some meaning.

Another benefit to reading without subvocalizing is “speed reading”. Speed reading has the benevolent effect of getting through the material a lot quicker which can be used to read more material related to the subject. In the sentence used above “The car is driving down the street at 100 miles per hour.” the speed reader “sees” the sentence and immediately visualizes the car speeding down the road. The meaning is more concrete when the information is processed this way.

MEMORIZING

It is common knowledge that the brain can remember fantastic amounts of information. The information is processed and “filed”. Simple techniques can be used to process information the same way you would if you were creating a filing cabinet. When structured this way the brain can recall information much more accurately and can retain the information much longer.

The two methods for memorizing are the loci and link system. We would need another article here to fully explain the methods but simply loci means pegging your bit of information to an actual location. The link system links each bit of information together to the next piece of information. An example of the loci system is to use every letter in the word KISS to mean something….in this case we know it as “Keep it simple stupid”. The link system links pieces of information together. For instance if I had to remember a list of grocery items: milk, bread, hamburger meat, tuna, garbage bags – -I could simply create a story and link each item as follows:

“I take some milk pour it into the glass and see some bread come out of the carton. I then take out the bread and use it as a hamburger bun and put the meat inside. I then feed the hamburger to my pet fish tuna. The tuna jumps out of the aquarium and lands in the garbage”

This story is easier to remember than a list of unrelated items.

NOTE TAKING

Note taking is another skill that should be learnt at an early age. A quick scan of your class will reveal students writing each essential point as a consecutive list as presented by the teacher. This list for instance may be comprised of a key word followed by a definition. However, effective note taking attempts to put the item being learned in context with everything else. Hence the best note takers are the ones who draw pictures. They will for instance write the central idea in the middle of the page – draw a circle around it and then link all the subtopics together with lines and more circles. This gives the student the big picture.

If mastered these three essential learning elements can drastically improve your learning and make the learning process much less frustrating.

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