Monday 18 April 2016

Stroop Effect - when the left and right sides of your brain fight for control!




Brain Floors - Thinking vs Keeping us safe.

 We adapted this idea from the internet to help explain two very important jobs our brain does.

Upstairs in our brains live little people called... Calming Cassie, Problem Solving Piper, Creative Callum and Flexible Fiona. They all help us do very clever thinking and help us learn.

Downstairs in our brain live our emotions and the emergency crew.
Happy Hugo is in charge most of the time until we sense danger... then Frightened Faith, Alerting Amelia, Rushing Ralph and Big Bossy Ben take over.

When downstairs takes over upstairs gets flipped out of the way and no one can go up and down the stairs.

Sometimes flipping our lid is the best thing to do - it keeps us out of danger. 

Big Bossy Ben can signal to other parts of our body to get ready. He can make our heart beat faster so we are ready to run very fast or our muscles ready to fight. 

He can also tell parts of our body to switch on or switch off. 

We might need to stay very still so we can hide from danger. 

Big Bossy Ben takes over to keep us safe.

Sometimes the downstairs crew get all worried about nothing and our brain gets ready to keep us safe - when we are already safe!

When this happens our brain as flipped for no reason and that stops us thinking properly. 
Calming Cassie, Problem Solving Piper, Creative Callum and Flexible Fiona need to take back control from the downstairs fellas so we can get back to normal thinking. Has that ever happened to you?



Sunday 10 April 2016

Let's challenge these brains then!







There is a battleship battle on that is ready to be continued next week. Lots of strategic thinking evidenced here.


 Daryna tried to teach Mrs Maw a new language - boy some of the sounds are tricky t get your tongue around - Mrs Maw needs LOTS more practise!

When your eyes trick your brain - blow your mind!

We investigated optical illusions. 

Take a look at the images and links to see what we found.








Click on each of these links to see some more.
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Link 10

Tuesday 5 April 2016

Jelly Brains day.



We got a jelly brain with no skull and no helmet to protect it. We took it to play to see what would happen.




 Here we are testing what happens on a normal slide trip.

Callum wondered... " What would happen to an acrobat's brain if it landed on the  concrete?"
So he through his groups brain at a tree and this is what happened... the brain and the skull both broke!



They took some pretty big knocks but stayed safe enough - playing is obviously fine for brain health!

To finish off we ate the jelly brains - they were soooooooo tasty. We talked about how in some countries they eat real uncooked brains. We didn't think we would be keen.