Lights Out, Middle Schoolers!

And that goes double for you, iPad, Mortal Kombat, TV, cell phones, and laptops!

Are tech toys stealing your sleep? Colorful, exciting tech screens are fun. But they can really mess up your sleep if you keep them on too long. Bright lights interfere with a great sleepytime chemical called melatonin that your body releases when the lights dim. Here's what happens to melatonin when tech toys light up the night:

• brightly-lit screens = less melatonin
• less melatonin =  trouble falling asleep 
• trouble falling asleep = falling asleep at school
• falling asleep at school = crankiness, forgetfulness, stress, and trouble with the teach.

Bad way to go to sleep--with the TV remote and a bowl of popcorn about to hit the floor. 

Isn't this better?

So put your screens to sleep 30 minutes before you put yourself to sleep. 

P.S. Feel free to pop in at Mizz C’s other snoozy blog posting--the one where she tells the world that sleep is an important study skill. 

Sleep workshop over. Go catch some zzzzs.

Finders Keepers

Mizz C’s pop quiz for today:

Q: How many minutes do you think most people spend looking for lost things every day, Middle Schoolers?

A: If you said, 16 minutes, you get an A+. Sez who? Sez James Gleick in his book, Faster. Would you like your 16 minutes back? Here’s how:

• Get rid of stuff you don’t use anymore. Less stuff=less to lose.

• Put things you really, really need in the same place every time.

• Line up school clothes where you can hop into them without opening your eyes in the morning. 

• Ditto sports gear, musical instruments, and other equipment you need at school the next day.

• Always check under and around bus and car seats when you leave a vehicle.

• Label your stuff.

• Check your school planner to see if you've packed the stuff you need the next day.

Warning: You may now leave this blog posting before Mizz C blabs on about her true lost and found story:

Once upon a time, while she was hiking, Mizz C. bent down to look at moss patterns on a rock or tie her boot--it doesn't matter which. Because she didn't close the zipper on her hiking jacket, EVEN THOUGH SHE KNEW BETTER!!!! her house keys fell out, unbeknownst to her. 


So Mizz C. went home, happy and smiling after her day in the woods until she discovered she had no keys. She immediately went into one of her little panic modes, tried to retrace her many steps, searching way, way longer than 16 minutes, but still NO KEYS!!! With a heavy heart, she broke into her own house. "Boo hoo," cried Mizz C. because those lost keys were attached to a pretty piece of jewelry she liked. Now that was lost forever, too.

Fast forward to six months later. A fat little envelope arrived from a supermarket. Inside were her lost keys! Some nice hiker had found Mizz C's keys, saw the supermarket tag, went to the store, the store traced the bar code back to Mizz C, and mailed them to her. 


Thank you nice hiker whose name she doesn't know. Thank you Stop & Shop. Henceforth Mizz C. put her keys into the SAME right-hand zippered pocket EVERY TIME just like she's telling all you middle schoolers to do right now!  

Now if she could only find her old Leki hiking poles. She knows they're up there somewhere in the Hudson Highlands! If only she'd thought ahead and put a supermarket tag on them. Lesson learned.

Decisions, Decisions

It starts before you even open your eyes. “Do I get out of bed right now or sleep five more minutes? Wear a jacket or sweater, sneakers or shoes to school today? Eat oatmeal, toast, or a muffin for breakfast? Grab an apple or banana for lunch? Sit in front or back of the school bus? Raise my hand in class or hide behind the kid in front of me? Start on easy or hard test questions? Pick a fantasy or a mystery book for my book report? Write about snakes or cockroaches for science? Do harder or easier homework first? Do all my homework right after school or right after dinner?”

Experts call having too many choices "decision fatigue." Mizz C. calls it brain freeze.

Here’s how one stressed-out student describes "decision fatigue:"

After making many decisions they become hard for me too. They also . . . make me very tired and lazy to the point where I don’t want to do anything. If they start to make me tired I procrastinate or try to forget that I have a decision to make.

Mizz C. has loads of decision making tips that she'll be blabbing about in the future. Here are a few starters:

• Only make big decisions you're rested and fed. 

• Save your brain power for deciding the big stuff. Figuring out what activities to choose is way more important than deciding what to have for breakfast.  

• Put small decisions on autopilot. Go with the same food choices, if possible, for some meals or snack times. It's Oatmeal-for Breakfast-Week! Every Monday is Green Pants Day. Too many choices? Toss a coin! Heads up, it's a mystery for the next book report or snakes for the science project. Do harder homework first one week then easier homework first the next week. Decide which homework style works better for you. Stick with it for good. 

Now if only someone could help Mizz C. decide which shampoo to buy when the store runs out of her usual brand. Shampoo for curly, frizzy, dry, oily hair? Flower or lemon-scented? Economy or trial size? 

Never mind. Mizz C. needs a nap.

Tame Your Paper Monsters

Mizz C. found this mashed-up test on the ground while walking near a local school. "How sad," Mizz C. thought as she picked up the corrected test in a failed attempt to save its life. 

Perhaps the student who dropped it had never had a chance to read Mizz C’s A+ Guide to Great Grades. Or maybe the wet, muddy ground was this student's filing system instead of a beautiful accordion folder like this.

XO Beautiful accordion folder

MIZZ C. LOVES, LOVES, LOVES  accordion folders. She wants to marry one, but she’s already married. She wants to live in a stationery store but already lives in a house. She’s all about filing recipes, bills, letters, receipts, and clippings.

Why just last month Mizz C. needed to find the receipt for her food processor, which shouldn’t have broken in the middle of grating three kinds of cheeses. But she had the store receipt in her “Household Appliances” accordion folder, of course! So when she called the company and read the receipt information to them, guess what? They sent her a new food processor for free!

                                                    Here it is: 

(The heirloom tomato is a hand-painted birthday card from her dear cousin Elizabeth, who suggested that Mizz C. was once a hot tomato but is now an heirloom tomato. So true.) 

"So what's your point, Mizz C?" you middle schoolers are probably wondering? "Are you about to share a tomato recipe? We thought this was a study skills blog, not a food blog." Mizz C's roundabout point is this great study tip: save and file away your school work until the end of the school year. After that, on the last day of school, you have Mizz C's permission to create a fleet of paper airplanes from all your work, after which you'll put them in the closest recycling bin sorted by subject like the organized A+ students Mizz C. knows you are. 


Your old corrected homework, tests, and teacher handouts are like Mizz C’s receipts. Keep them in a file or accordion folder at home even if they have ketchup on them, jam prints,  or a grade you'd rather forget. They’re the best study tools ever for future tests. Handouts clue you in to what your teacher will probably put on a test. Corrected tests and homework show what you're strong in and what needs work. So give your handouts, old tests, and homework a good home:

Oh! Oh! One more thing before the blogger authorities shut down Mizz C. for blabbing too much. Write your name and the date on all your handouts, tests, and homework assignments in case they lose you. That way if Mizz C. finds one of your important class papers on her daily walks, she can track you down.

Time Flies When You're Hooked on the Internet

What’s this chicken doing on Mizz C’s brand-new blog? The chicken is Mizz C’s kitchen timer. She uses it to keep cupcakes, turkeys, brownies--and her work time--from burning up.

Now Mizz C. has a horrible, embarrassing confession to make. Not so long ago, she could sometimes be an A+ Time Waster. She surfed the Internet and checked her e-mails a million times a day for no good reason.

This had to stop.

So Mizz C. started setting her chicken timer for chunks of work time. When the timer dinged, she would take a a short break to read e-mails and check out silly animal YouTube videos.

Lo and behold! The chicken timer helped Mizz C. get more work done. So she began to let her chicken timer boss her around instead of the Internet.

“Hey, maybe middle graders should use kitchen timers to get their homework done,” Mizz C. thought. And that’s how she came up with the A+ 20/10 Study Method. It’s all explained in Mizz C’s A+ Guide to Great Grades.  

In the meantime, go to the kitchen. See if you can find a timer.

Or ask one of your parents to get you one instead of a new bike, video game, or trip to Disneyland. 




From now on, you can keep those plug-in, screen-faced time thieves--computers television, video games, and the telephone from taking over your life. 

The A+ 20/10 Study Method really works. Mizz C. used it to write today’s blog post. When the chicken timer goes off, she’ll reset it for just a few minutes to watch her favorite penguin YouTube video. It cracks her up every time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pK8dplyTHM&feature=related

Mizz C. and the A+ Guides Get a Makeover

  

“Mizz C! Mizz C! An eighth grader made a paper airplane out of the vocabulary handout, and it’s flying over Columbus Avenue. Do I still have to take the test?"

"Mizz C! Mizz C! I forgot my locker combination, and my math handout was inside. Can I skip the test?"

Mizz C. often heard questions like these when dinosaurs roamed the halls of the middle school where she once taught. That was back in the last century when Mizz C. and her students were all middle grade newbies. 

Mizz C. wanted to help her students survive and enjoy the middle grades. So she became an expert in getting lockers unstuck and tracking down runaway textbooks.

In those good old olden days, Mizz C. often thought: “There should be study skills books on getting organized for school, taking tests, writing papers, and giving speeches.” So she wrote a series of books called the A+ Guides.


Mizz C’s middle-graders moved up to high school. Her A+ Guides moved up to the attic where they got a little yellow and faded. A whole century passed. Soon it was 2011. Mizz C. heard rumors. Many middle grade kids still couldn’t find missing handouts or get their lockers opened. Mizz C. got to thinking. “Why not publish some new A+ Guides just like the old ones?”


“Well, that won’t work,” Mizz C. soon realized. “A lot of new fangled things have been invented. Students aren’t writing with quill pens anymore. 

Some of them write on typing machines called computers.” 

Mizz C. had to face the truth. She and her A+ Guides needed makeovers.


So Mizz C. threw out pages from her faded, yellowed A+Guides. She researched the latest organizing, note taking, test taking, and writing tips. She even added health tips she had learned about while writing many other books besides the A+ Guides. She gave her books bright new covers. Then she took the scariest step of all.


MIZZ C. WENT DIGITAL!!!!

Mizz C. could now send her new books, just like that, into outer space to something called the Internet. 


Mizz C. also learned something else: there was a new way of writing for complete strangers. It was called blogging, which sounded a little bit like blabbing. Mizz C. decided to begin blabbing—blogging that is—whenever she had an opinion. Which was a lot.


After blogging came Facebook, and Twitter.


Now Mizz C. is officially in the 21st Century. She’s inviting all middle graders to come on in. No need to buy an A+ Guide to read Mizz C’s blog post, though she won’t stop you if you’d like to. Mizz C. likes nothing better than giving advice--even when people don’t ask for it. Stop by anytime.