Home, Health & Style, Popular

Good Relationships – Healthy Relationships – Tips for Kids

Relationships are hard at any age. Remember that we don’t just talk about relationships when we mean a boyfriend or a girlfriend – it’s about how you get on with your parents, your friends and other people important to you.
There are certain basic ideas that are important to developing good relationships; you master these and life suddenly becomes a lot less stressful! Alice Hoyle has some ideas that may help you have better relationships with the people in your life.

 

Communication

Image by Robert Collins on Unsplash

Communication is the most important aspect of any relationship. Sharing things with people in your life is important. We do this mostly by speaking and listening. It is important to share how you feel about things and to listen and try to understand how others feel about things (this is called empathy).

How good are you at both talking AND listening? If you favour doing only one of them in a relationship then this isn’t as balanced as it could be- you probably need to work on doing both and so should the other person.

Also sometimes people might say something but their body language (how someone uses their body or their facial expression) maybe saying something different. Take some time to consider what is your body language saying when you talk? What is their body language saying? Do you make eye contact when you talk?

A key to successful communication is to use “I” statements instead of “you” statements- eg. “I feel sad when you call me silly” is better than “You calling me silly makes me sad” because the second one can put the person on the defensive straight away and the conversation can go badly after that.

Read More...

Toys and Games

Video Games for the Family – For Everyone To Enjoy

My name is Andy Robertson and I write about video games for a living and have three children (10, 8 and 6 years old). Video-games are a tricky part of life to get right in a family, too much and they take over every waking hour, too little and they become consigned to kid’s bedrooms and dad’s bathroom breaks.
I’ve been working with families for the last few years to help them get more out of the games they play. Playing games together, usually downstairs in the shared family spaces, along with introducing a wider range of gaming experiences can transform their place in the home.

Read More...

Popular, Science, Nature and Tech

Have you ever wondered…why leaves change colour in autumn?

Autumn is a season of change; the weather gets colder, there’s less daylight and leaves change colour and fall from plants. But why does this happen?

Why Do Plants Have Leaves?

Leaves contain a chemical called chlorophyll (pronounced KLO-ro-fil), which as well as giving them their lovely green colour also helps create food for the plant. The leaves act like tiny solar panels, and use the sun’s energy to convert water (from the ground) and a gas called carbon dioxide (from the air) into sugar and oxygen. This process is called photosynthesis (pronounced foto-SIN-theh-sis), and the sugar is what the plant lives on.

Read More...