DaddyDear

MummyDear and I attended a short workshop at Ashley’s school last Friday evening. I felt that it’s more like a mini sales talk by an external consultant selling their product. The consultant was encouraging the parents to persuade the school to adopt the program. Despite the sub-standard sales talk, I did pick up a new tool that may come in handy when coaching kids or even adults on emotion management.

This tool is the “Emotion Thermometer”. It was introduced by Dr Michelle Garnett as a technique for scaling emotional intensity by drawing pictures against a scale similar to a thermometer, hence allowing a person to describe and process their emotional experience in a concrete and specific manner.

Here’s an example I found in an article at smelena.com:

I find it especially useful when applied on young kids who are not equipped with sufficient vocabulary to describe their emotions, as it’ll help them to visualize the level of their emotional state with reference to a scale using pictures or simple words. The process of creating the “thermometer” activates both the left and right brain, and will be more appealing to the “visual” and “kinesthetic” people.

Come across this interesting Nintendo DS game call “Brain Age”.

Inspired by cutting-edge neuroscience, Brain Age is a full set of reading and mathematic exercises that stimulate the brain. At the start, you’ll take a series of tests and get a score that determines how old your brain is. This is your “Brain Age” — by performing daily exercises just minutes a day over weeks and months, the better you’ll get and the lower your Brain Age will get.

Dr. Elizabeth Zelinski is a memory and cognition expert. She’s also a professor of gerontology and psychology and the dean of the University of Southern California Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. She has been playing Brain Age regularly for more than a month and has scored a “DS brain age” as low as 20. Dr. Zelinski enjoys the stimulating mathematical “Calculation” task most, declaring that “it’s made me less reliant on my calculator!”

Listen to Dr. Zelinski in a radio interview describe how the brain changes as we age and how Brain Age can give your brain the workout it craves in order to stay sharp.

Anyone has played this game before?

This is the last weekend before school reopens. Ashley’s cousins (JY, WY & Des) “camped” at our place on Saturday night to play Cashflow 101 game. I was the banker cum facilitator cum Ashley’s mentor. We started the 1st game at around 10pm and ended at around 1pm with WY attaining her dream and Ashley out of the rat race. The second game started at around 11am and ended at around 1pm on the next day, with Ashley attaining her dream and WY out of the rat race. Interesting to note that the same two people got out of the rat race for both games.

The top 3 reasons why the other two players never attain their dreams or got out of the rat race:

1. Did not focus on the goal of the game, i.e. building passive income to be more than expenses. They enjoyed shouting “pay check”, and satisfied with holding cash in their hands.
2. Not willing to take risk. They kept choosing the small deals despite having enough money for the big deals.
3. Focusing on the “negative” spaces, i.e.”Baby” or “Downsized”, and hope not to land there. Interestingly, the more they didn’t want it, the more often they landed there.

Game is a reflection of life. Let’s take some time to reflect on our habits, both good and bad ones, and evaluate how these habits helped or hindered our game play.

Learning anything, and especially a musical instrument, requires perseverance and lots of practice. Most children are not able to maintain focus for extended period of time in most things they do, unless they have fun out of it. Sounds familiar, isn’t it? I bet most adults like myself are also similar.

The best way I’ve found to get my daughter interested to play violin was to turn it into a guess-the-title game. I asked her to play a song, and I’ll guess the title of it, and pretending to guess wrongly most of the time. Well … I actually didn’t know the title. Hehehehe … She liked the game, and will keep asking me to listen her play every time.

We’ve not played this game for quite some time already. Perhaps I could use this method to motivate GG when she can play more songs.