A great free site that offers fun and education for families is Bitstrips.com. The site is designed so you can make your own comic strips. You can type text into speech bubbles with several font options. There’s plenty here for beginning writers to explore.
Bitstrips is simple to navigate. Children can become familiar with the click-tools in 10 minutes or less. Adults can let kids use the site on their own, and ask the youngsters for a tutorial later.
Whether you’re a teacher, a home schooling parent, a tutor, or even a babysitter, you can integrate bitstrips into a literacy lesson that lets everyone publish a final result.
At around 7 months, babies all begin to make the same “ba ba ba” noises. The babbling noises aren’t the only indication that babies are aware of speech patterns. Babies also talk with their hands. they make rhythmic motions with their hands that follow speech patterns.
Laura Ann Petitto, a Professor in the Department of Education and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College did research in 2001 on children of deaf parents.
According to Petitto, The results of the study, titled “Language Rhythms in Babies’ Hand Movements,” support the idea that babies are born with sensitivity to highly specific rhythmic patterns found in natural language–a sensitivity that is so powerful that a baby can find and produce the rhythms of language on the hand as equally as is possible on the tongue.”
“The sing-song way in which delighted parents speak to their baby, and the playful rhyming games common to nursery rhymes at home and in school, are clearly more important for a child’s developing brain than we ever imagined, and they provide an important tool for the young child to discover the grammar and structure of her native language.”
1. Musical training helps develop brain areas involved in language and reasoning. Recent studies have clearly indicated that musical training physically develops the left side of the brain.
2. There is a link between music and spatial intelligence (ability to perceive the world accurately to form mental pictures of things). This kind of intelligence is necessary for solving math problems to being able to pack a backpack with everything that will be needed for the day.
3. Studies show that students who study arts are more successful on standardized
tests.
4. Study of the arts provides children with an internal glimpse of other cultures.
5. Students of music learn what constitutes good, as opposed to mediocre work. These standards demand a new level of excellence and require students to stretch their inner resources.
6. Students learn the value of sustained effort to achieve, and the concrete rewards of hard work.
7. Music study enhances teamwork and discipline to achieve a single goal, the performance, and must commit to learning, attend rehearsals, and practice.
8. Music provides children with a means of self-expression. Self-esteem is a by-product of this self-expression.
9. Music study focuses on “doing,” as opposed to observing, and teaches students how to perform.
10. Arts education exposes children to the incomparable.
Abby Sunderland is safely aboard a French vessel after being stranded in the Indian Ocean. The 16-year-old sailor was the third teen to attempt a non-stop round-the-world solo journey.
Abby’s ship, Wild Eyes, lost its mast and rigging, and Abby activated an emergency location beacon. She was found by a French ship Saturday morning. This has raised numerous questions about the safety of teen adventurers scaling Everest, sailing solo, flying planes, and taking on other challenges that are considered adult pursuits.
It is arguable that teens are more likely to make gut-level decisions due to less developed frontal lobes. However, extensive practice and knowledge in a subject provides a skill set for younger minds to rely on in challenging situations.
America was colonized by pioneers who left their home-lands with worse equipment, less sailing experience, and no communication equipment. Many of these pioneers were viewed as young adults, although they weren’t much older than Abby. Some never expected to see their relatives again; all knew they might not survive.
The entrepreneurial spirit is what made this nation great. It is the duty of all parents to raise children who are competent in challenging situations. It is no challenge at all to raise 30-year-old teenagers who watch TV all day.
Dreams are a compilation of unedited images, information and imagination. The power of dreams lies not so much in their content as in the behavior of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind doesn’t have much of a truth filter. It believes what it’s told by your dreams.
This makes it especially important to have good dreams. If you dream pleasant, proactive or uplifting dreams, you wake up with a positive outlook. Similarly, this is why negative dreams can make you feel uneasy upon waking.
If you need to improve your mood, consider manipulating your dreamtime. Your brain is most likely to dream about information it gathered before going to bed. This means that positive affirmation tapes, music with uplifting lyrics, or a personal pep-talk or success mantra can have a healthy effect on your psyche.
If you’re studying for a test. Do a recap in the evening. Fifteen minutes of listening to your own voice on tape before bed every night can help train your brain to focus on the information you need to remember. If you’ve typed notes into a computer, consider using text-to-speech TTS to keep your subconscious in the loop.
Consider giving yourself a dream speech or pep talk before nodding off. Over time, this proactive message will have an impact on your subconscious and you’ll find yourself more likely to think and feel the things you’ve consciously chosen.
For artistic reasons, you can journal your dreams each morning. Who knows what kind of creative material your mind could supply you with?
This is the fifth day of your plan to create a habit for success.
By now you should have some great notes on what works and what doesn’t. Keep evaluating.
Look at yesterday’s list of what got done.
Evaluate the areas where you need improvement. Maybe you need to turn off the phone while you devote time to your avocation. Maybe you need to schedule it when other family members aren’t around. The idea is to tweak your schedule and tweak your goals, until your schedule allows you the time to implement habits that meet those goals.
This is a refining process that should be part of your daily routine. If you’re having trouble establishing the routine, this process will help install it in your life.
It’s a bit like installing a computer program. You have to go into your “preferences” window and do some adjusting. If you keep at it, you’ll get better at two things.
The first thing you’ll get better at is the activity you’ve chosen. The other thing is meeting goals in general. Self discipline itself is a learned behavior and a valuable habit to cultivate over time.
Language students can experience language immersion with this fun exercise. Have your students to approach a stranger or acquaintance and ask the person to teach them a joke.
This can be done at a bus stop, in a grocery store or coffee shop, at a laundromat, or anywhere else people have downtime.
The students should ask for an explanation of the joke. They’ll be sharing it with their classmates later, so understanding the punch line is important.
This exercise creates a language immersion experience. That’s a situation in which a speaker of one language is fully immersed in communication in the new language. This is important for language learners, and it’s a difficult environment for all learners to find.
The jokes will provide a necessary learning platform with the added bonus of laughter.
Creating Habits for Success involves continually reviewing your activity. This is the same activity you did two days ago.
Write down what you did, just like you did in part 2. 
Don’t bother analyzing why you didn’t achieve any goals. That is a separate activity for a separate day. Just take time to update your list and write down which goals were completed. It’s important to acknowledge what works as being separate from what doesn’t work.
Write down how much time you spent on your daily goals. Include the exact time. Include any distractions that you ignored. For example:
I practiced the harp for 25 minutes and ignored the ringing phone!
Tomorrow we’ll get to part 5, and we’ll be one step closer to success.
It’s time to analyze your results for creating habits for success.
Creating habits for success requires that you determine what stands in the way of implementing those habits. So get
your list from yesterday and analyze your results.
Why didn’t something get done? Was there a time conflict? Were your daily goals impossible to implement with your resources: time, money, energy, and inclination?
Write these things down. For every single daily goal that didn’t get met, you should generate a list of reasons. Take time today to really reflect on why something didn’t get done. Don’t be hard on yourself. Just acknowledge that there are only 24 hours in a day, and your time and other resources get allocated to other things. The point of this exercise is to determine where your new habit will and won’t fit into your existing routine.
Keep these lists handy. You’ll be updating them as you continue to create successful habits.
Tomorrow: we’ll refocus and continue.
The second activity for creating your habit for success is to monitor your results.
This is very important. Don’t criticize your results, just write them down. The idea is to keep track of what you did do. Successful habits are on the way, and this is the process for creating them.
If you completed all of the activities on your list, write that down. If you didn’t do the list items, write that down.
The important thing here is to get a very clear picture of what you did. You already know what you haven’t gotten done to achieve your goals. This list is to determine what you are doing.
Part 3 is the next critical step. It’s the review process and it begins tomorrow.
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