Salty Sam’s Fun Blog for Children
Number 496
Pep Talk
Hello Everyone
Have you bought a new school uniform for this September?
Are you starting a new school and you need to get a special uniform for it or maybe you just need some new shirts or trousers because the ones you have are too small or worn out.
Maybe you just need a new pencil case and some colouring pencils.
Maybe you are looking forward to going back to school. Maybe you have a lovely teacher like Miss Pringle.
She is very encouraging to all her children.
You might be especially good at sports and have a teacher at school who has talent-spotted you and gives you extra help. Top sports people get a lot of encouragement from people called coaches who work with them or the team they play in. People who are still working their way up in their chosen sport may not be so lucky.
Not everyone, whether they are a child or an adult gets a lot of encouragement in their life.
lf you don’t get much encouragement; you might even have people putting you down all the time, the good news is that you can do the job yourself!
You can be your own cheerleader.
You can encourage yourself. And you can choose what you need to hear. You can give yourself a pep talk whenever you need one.
The brain very often believes what it is told often enough even if what it is being told is not true or not true yet. This is called brainwashing.
And in a sense you can brainwash yourself – in a good way.
You can choose what attributes you want to have as a person, then keep telling yourself this is true and eventually you will start believing it and then become that person you keep telling yourself you are.
You will grow into the person you want to be.
Some people use the phrase, ‘Fake it ‘till you make it’.
lt is very clever really.
Refrain from saying things like, ‘oh, l am an idiot’ and ‘l am always doing the wrong thing’ and ‘l can’t get anything right’ and ‘why do l always mess up’.
Start saying things like, ‘l am good at focussing on my lessons at school’ and ‘l am going to do well in my football match today’ and ‘l have really improved my reading skills this term, l am very proud of the effort and progress l have made.’
Focus on potential and opportunity. lt might seem strange at first but it is a good habit to get into.
Put the phrases about yourself like ‘l am a good footballer’ in the present tense – not ‘l will be one day in the future’.
These phrases are called affirmations. They build up your inner strength. Top athletes say that most of their success is due to mental strength!
This encouragement is even more valuable than someone else doing it for you; even if it may seem more difficult at first. Your own voice is the strongest one in your life.
This is so peculiar at first, because it seems at odds to what is. But the more you do it, the more usual it will become. Repetition is a powerful tool to imprint something in your mind!
Tell yourself you are doing well when you wake up in the morning, as you sit up, while you get up and start getting ready for your day.
This sets you up from the start of the day with a good mindset and self-confidence.
Talk into the mirror, look into your eyes and this will double the strength of what you are telling yourself.
Doing this is especially useful if you are going through a bit of a crisis and you have to do be doing things that are not easy to face up to.
Write down your affirmations to give them extra power.
You can add new ones whenever you want to.
Only you know what will help the most.
Be very specific and be passionate in what you say.
Make your declarations positive.
You have to train your brain to stay positive; it is too easy to slip into the negative and remember the bad things that happen to you.
You need to magnify the good and have faith that more good is on the way.
This will improve your school work, your friendships and any projects you want to start.
lf you like my blog, please support it by telling all your friends and followers about it.
Thank you!
And see you again next Fun Friday!
Love and kisses
Salty Sam
www.christina-sinclair.com
Bill and Bob’s Joke of the Week
Bill: Do you know why people rob banks?
Bob: Yes, because that is where the money is!
Salty Sam © Christina Sinclair 2015
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of material from this blog without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited.
Links may be used to www.christina-sinclair.com
Picture Gallery
THE SALTY SAM NEWS DESK
This week, Auntie Alice came up with the idea for a brilliant new game for the children to make and play.
You can make this game to learn how to read your own language or another new language.
When should you start learning another language?
As young as possible!
When you are a very young child, your brain is a language sponge. You will find it very easy to learn new words and it will never be as easy again.
You will probably learn another language at school sometime.
Whether you will learn another language in the future or you have already started, you will always want to be learning new words.
It is best in the beginning of learning a new language to learn vocabulary in lexical sets – that means learning words in connected groups.
So for example:
Things to be found in the bathroom
Things to be found in the bedroom
Things to be found in the garden
Things to be found in a pencil case
Things to be found on a beach
Things you see in the sky
Farm animals
Wild animals
Sea creatures
And so on…
Put the article before the noun as well
So for example:
A chair
La chaise (French)
Make sure you have enough space to write under your picture.
A leg
La pierna (Spanish)
Repetition is the key to remembering new words.
That is how this game can help. You will need a few people to play.
Only learn one new language at a time.
Make up two sets of identical cards. The cards should be about the size of playing cards but they can be a bit bigger or smaller. You can buy thin card to cut up or cut up cereal, pizza, chocolate packets and use the plain side of the card.
Draw a picture of an object, you can copy the pictures out of a picture dictionary, or glue on a picture you have printed out.
Write the name of the object underneath it in English – and then if you want to, another language underneath that.
Writing the word out is the first step to learning. You must know how to pronounce the word as well as spell it.
Deal one pack of cards out amongst the players. Each player must have sixteen cards in front of them face up in four rows of four cards.
The other pack must be shuffled and held by the ‘bingo caller’.
You can play the game with cards from just one or two lexical sets if you have enough of them. If you have made a set with something like pictures of things found in the kitchen you should have quite a few items in just one category.
The ‘bingo caller’ lays a card down face up one at a time calling out the word as they do so.
If a player has a matching card they can put a small object like a coin, paper clip or tiny toy onto that card. When they have four matching cards in a row they win the game – or have all the cards matched.
If you have only two players, you can muddle all the cards up on a table face down and try matching pairs up in a memory game by pulling them out, looking at them and putting them back one at a time – of course, if you find a matching pair you can keep it and the person with the most cards at the end of the game wins.
If you are working alone, you can look at the tops of the cards and see if you can remember the word written at the bottom.
The most important thing is to keep looking at the cards over and over to memorize all the words.
Of course, this won’t help you to make whole sentences; but when you start to learn the language in sentences, the grammar comes more easily when you understand a lot of words.
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Quick Quiz
Can you correct these sentences?
- As you get older your birthdays come round quicker.
- He was stood at the back of the room.
- l was sat in the garden.
- lt is goodnight from John and l.
- l was on tender hooks.
lt’s the Weekend!
HOW TO MAKE A FOOTBALL MASCOT
When you play in a sports team you may have a coach that gives you a pep talk before the match, during and even afterwards as well.
With the football season starting you may want to knit this little fellow in the colours of your team.
He could hang from your bed post, bedroom door handle or a car mirror.
You can use three colours if you need to by knitting his arms a third colour.
HEAD AND BODY (KNIT ONE)
Using 4mm knitting needles and red dk yarn cast on 20 stitches
Knit 6 rows of stocking stitch
Change to white dk yarn
Knit 8 rows of stocking stitch
Don’t cast off – leave a length of yarn for sewing up when you cut off your yarn and leave your stitches on this yarn
LEGS (KNIT TWO)
Using 4mm knitting needles and red dk yarn cast on 8 stitches
Knit 6 rows of stocking stitch
Change to black dk yarn
Knit 2 rows of stocking stitch
Don’t cast off – leave a length of yarn for sewing up when you cut off your yarn and leave your stitches on this yarn
ARMS (KNIT TWO)
Using 4mm knitting needles and white dk yarn cast on 6 stitches
Knit 6 rows of stocking stitch
Don’t cast off – leave a length of yarn for sewing up when you cut off your yarn and leave your stitches on this yarn
BASE (KNIT ONE)
Using 4mm knitting needles and red dk yarn cast on 30 stitches
Cast off
LOOP (MAKE ONE)
Crochet 5 chains into a length of black yarn
TO MAKE UP
- Using over-sew stitching and with right sides together sew back seam of head and body and also the arms and leg seams using appropriate colours
- Turn right sides out and pull tops of head, feet and hands in tight
- Stuff the body and legs with some stuffing and the ends of the yarn
- Stuff the arms with the ends of the yarn
- Bind a length of white yarn around the wrists and pull in tight then secure ends and push inside the arms
- Bind a length of black yarn around the ankles and pull in tight then secure ends and push inside the stuffing
- Sew the tops of the legs to the bottom of the body and the tops of the arms to the sides of the body from behind
- Add the black French knot eyes before or after sewing up – wrap the yarn around your yarn needle three times
- Sew the loop to the top of the head (you may ned to make your loop longer)
Please note that the material on this blog is for personal use and for use in classrooms only.
It is a copyright infringement and, therefore, illegal under international law to sell items made with these patterns.
Use of the toys and projects is at your own risk.
©Christina Sinclair Designs 2015
Quick Quiz Answers
- As you get older, your birthdays come round more quickly. (Come is a verb and needs an adverb to match with it)
- He was standing at the back of the room. (Not supposed to be the passive)
- l was sitting in the garden. (Not supposed to be the passive)
- lt is goodnight from John and me. (Take out the word John and you can see that ‘l’ does not work)
- l was on tenter hooks. (lt means anxious)
Hooks used to hang cloth up on a device called a tenter
It was used in the process of making woollen cloth
Embroidery Stitches
