Turn the pages of your 3rd Grade Environmental Science textbook and you would realise how early in your academics, you were introduced to the lessons of life. Though the origin of plants on earth, was traced back to around 3.5 billion years ago, they are still the reason for human life on earth. If we refer to our textbooks then, photosynthesis is a process through which plants take in Sunlight, Carbon Dioxide and Water and convert it into Oxygen. The growth of the plant depends on the intake of these three basic needs.
The Dark Knight vs The Real Knight
We won’t enter the much debatable topic about who's the best, DC or Marvel? Even though your favourite is either one of them, there are certain characters that speaks for themselves . It might be a superhero, villain or even a sidekick. Their character stands out and appeals to the audience. One such character could be our Batman. You might be a Marvel fan, but there must be a point of time when you just associated yourself with our very dear superhero.
The 2nd Youngest Grandmaster of India - Gukesh
You find twelve year old kids, beaming with energy, always on a go, dreaming to be their favourite idol. They build their own world around themselves, filled with imagination and aspirations. This is the age when they are about to reach their teenage, there is always an adrenaline rush that stimulates all their senses.
While every student was busy building their own world, D Gukesh, a twelve year old kid based in Chennai built his name as the World’s 2nd youngest Grandmaster. He achieved his final GM norm while he was participating in the 17th Delhi International Chess Grandmaster open against IM Dinesh K Sharma. He achieved such great heights in chess at the age of Twelve years, seven months and seventeen days. Though he missed the World Record of Sergey Karjakin, a Russian chess player by a whisker of just 17 days, he still aims high and continues to be focused on other tournaments and championships.
Chess is the gymnasium of the Mind- Blaise Pascal
We know Blaise Pascal as the inventor of Pascaline, the first mechanical calculator and we believe there is a story to every invention or discovery. The story behind the invention of the first mechanical calculator is quite simple. Pascal’s father was working as a tax collector in the French city of Rouen in the year 1642, and in order to help his father with the calculations, pascal developed the world’s first mechanical calculator.
A noble cause that left the windows of opportunity open for others, to take inspiration from the raw format of a mechanical calculator and advance its functions. That’s life, you need inspiration, and you can find them anywhere. From people, things or just words. One such quote by Blaise Pascal is ‘chess is the gymnasium of the mind’.
Benjamin Franklin: The Morals of Chess (Explained) Part - 4
Benjamin Franklin's essay, the morals of chess, is still celebrated among the chess lovers. All the four virtues are abided by people to succeed in chess and in life. There is a strong notion that exists among players ‘There are times when a well-placed pawn is more powerful than the king.' So, the placement of the pawn is crucially important to overpower the game. Very similar to life, where trivial circumstances or situations lead you to define the course of your life. In this blog, we would discuss, Benjamin Franklin's fourth and final virtue of chess.
Benjamin Franklin: The Morals of Chess (Explained) Part-3
Indeed true, the upheavals in one's life fly away swiftly leaving a clear sky, and then life goes on. But for some people, a storm is a dramatic magnificent dance of nature that needs to be enjoyed. True to its saying, Benjamin Frankin was different, he was one that fell in love with the storm. His deep love for oceans and storms stimulated him to discover the modern understanding of the Gulf stream. Among his numerous voyages that took him to places, he encountered violent storms in the ocean. During his frequent sailing between Europe and North America, he started to notice a pattern to these storms and concluded the understanding of Gulf stream, an ocean current that effects weather on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Benjamin Franklin: The Morals of Chess (explained) Part -1
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing" The American Superhero, Benjamin Franklin was a prominent figure of the early American history. What's incredible about his personality, he wasn't restricted to any particular profession. He played contrasting roles in different phases of his life, he was a leading author, civic activist, political theorist, diplomat and even a postmaster. He believed in an uninterrupted flow of life, just like a river.
Explore the creativity of your child through robotics and coding
Kids are known to be inquisitive. They would constantly have thousands of questions bubbling in their mind and they love to find the answers to them. The Sci-fi movies today even blow an adult's minds away. Back in the days, when we as kids used to be awestruck by watching movies like Jurassic Park or Star Wars, imagine the level of excitement for kids who belong to the present generation!
The Pursuit of a Better Brain
In the critically acclaimed Hollywood movie, “The Pursuit of Happyness” – a biopic on Chris Gardener, the famous investor, inspirational speaker and author - there is a scene where the protagonist solves the Rubik’s Cube during a cab ride.
While sharing a ride with an enterprising stockbroker from a prestigious firm, Chris Gardener (played by veteran actor Will Smith) notices the man struggling with a Rubik’s Cube and offers to solve it. Apparently, Gardener solves the Cube before they reach the destination, impresses the man, lands a position as a trainee in the company and goes on to create history!
Chess for kids - A game at leisure and a medium to surge grades at school.
For most parents, the arrival of a child is a vow to work towards the well being of their bundle of joy. As the child grows, their expectations and aspirations from the child increases gradually. What remains constant, is their wish to mould their child into a good human being, imbibing the basic humanitarian qualities and moral virtues.
“By all means let’s be open-minded. But not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”
The words of Dr. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist & author, seems quite applicable in the way our youngest generation is sprouting up. Raised in the lap of technology, Gen Z is all wired up in technology 24/7. The American Academy of Paediatrics reports that on an average, kids spend up to 7 hours a day on some or other random electronic device. The question is what do they filter and what goes into their brains?
Not just practice, but these activities help in improving your game of Chess
Is your child a passive plodder who needs to be pushed around? Or is he/she a silent observer or perhaps a hyper energy-ball who requires some toning down? At Mind Mentorz we believe that the behavioral patterns of a child are closely associated with his or her mental development. We aim to season and temper the young minds in a magic pot of brain-games, channelizing their energies, creativity, and thought-process in a well-balanced and productive way.
You have been wrong about Rubik’s cube all this long!
A child is a curious soul, full of energy, inquisitive and innovative. They have the potential to build an imaginative kingdom around them and bring out their artistic self. The only needful aspect is to give a direction to those art and imagination. They need to have steady and gradual all-round development. We at Mind Mentorz work to put the kids at the forefront and provide them with tools, devices and instruments that harness their mind.
Rubik’s cube – A colorful nourishment for the young mind
There is almost no household without this tiny but significant piece of puzzle – The Rubik’s Cube. Most of us just fiddle with it, try and rotate it in all possible directions to get at least on side of the cube to the same color. It is usual to give it up after a few minutes, mostly out of helplessness of not being able to solve it. As per statistics, less than 45% of the people can solve this puzzle. When the founder of this puzzle– Erno Rubik, himself took about a month to solve it, it is definitely not an easy nut to crack.
Brain Areas That Chess And Other Mind Games Activate
Just like our body muscles require a physical workout to stay healthy, even our brain needs some mental exercise to work properly and stay healthy. Some people have a misconception that the learning techniques deployed by the schools are enough and it helps the kid’s brain stay active. But in reality, most of the schools are teaching the children to mug up information instead of understanding the basics of each topic. So can a brain develop by just memorizing things? Definitely not!
Reasons Afterschool Programs Are Beyond Just Leisure Activities and Engagement
With the world becoming more competitive every passing day, school education alone is not enough to prepare the children for tomorrow. Schools do impart knowledge, but they don’t run programs to take care of students who face learning and focus issues. Moreover, school programs are not designed to enhance the children’s soft skills and development of survival skills. The need to thoroughly prepare children for the life’s survival race has given rise to many afterschool programs. Though a lot of parents enroll their kids in multiple afterschool programs to restrict them from wasting their after-school time in unproductive activities, they are not aware of the many benefits that an afterschool program delivers.
Brain Gym: What It Actually Means For Your Mind And Body
To cope up with today’s stressful and highly competitive world, people are planning to prepare their children from the early stages of life. A lot of parents have enrolled their children in yoga classes and several other programs to enhance the physical capability of kids, but there is one mistake that most of them are making. Physical fitness is essential, and it can be attained with the help of a gym, but what about the mental fitness? Isn’t it equally important? The word “fitness” is not limited to just physical health. Both emotional and physical fitness are required in equal proportion to become truly successful in life. Just like a typical gym takes care of the physical fitness of a person, the brain gym takes care of the mental fitness.
How Mind Games Differ From Sports and Activities?
In today’s competitive world, competition is not restricted to an adult’s work-life alone. Children also are exposed to fierce competition in academics, extra-curricular activities, and other life areas as well. To help the children get on the top of the game, a lot of parents are getting their children enrolled in different sports programs or other recreational programs. But what about nurturing the child’s mental skills in a fun way? Involving your children in sports and other activities do help their body to become active and less vulnerable to diseases, but sports don’t train your children’s mind to act wisely or become an independent thinker.
A Glimpse Into the Competitive Learning Environment that We Foster at Mind Mentorz
Extra-curricular activities – We have been told since time immemorial that it is essential to participate in activities that are separate from our day to day actions.
Let’s take a second to figure out exactly why this is so important. Besides the overused terms such as personality development and forming of a well-rounded individual, we tend to ignore the main purpose of these activities that is to build and improve cognitive function. It is scientifically proven that beginning to work on these skills at an early age helps not only academically but also allows the mind to think differently and perform tasks with more efficiency.
How In-person Classes at Mind Mentorz Help Develop Your Kids' Cognitive Skills?
There are classes and then there are classes that are fun and interactive. Mind Mentorz belongs to the latter class of afterschool programs. The fundamentals of an afterschool institute is the same - a safe and secure premises, essential equipments, mentors and coaches. But where we differ is the way we approach our programs.
Here, we believe in collective evolution and all of us develop new skills, learn things, interpret, apply and have fun doing them. One of our major elements we consider as our primal success is the fact that kids love coming back to our classes every week. We have heard personally that they wait to get to classes and participate in our sessions. That is by far the biggest compliment we have ever received.
But how do we do this? How can you make learning fun and still substantially develop kids' cognitive skills? Well, here's how!
The Atmosphere
At Mind Mentorz, we foster an atmosphere that kids love. Such an atmosphere sustains interests in kids and help them be at their best phases of creativity, imagination, competitive levels and more. We add interesting and unique ways to keep our programs and classes fun and interactive so there is active participation and involvement from every kid in the program.
We also leave space for healthy competition in our programs so kids can realize at a very young age that it is important to know where they stand in comparison to others and how they can bring in their unique identity, perspective and thoughts in their work to stand out. Once we set the stage for competition, we see kids going an extra mile in bettering themselves and even helping other kids in the process.
Room for Creativity and Imagination
One of the major things that differentiates kids from us is their ability to be creative and imaginative. Logic to them is ancillary and the focus is more on believing their thoughts are true. Innate features like these are what would lay foundations for discoveries and make the world a better place. When kids come up with something unthinkable, we don't buzzkill by proving them wrong. We let them explore the possibilities and nurture their creativity to make their visions true.
Our robotics and coding classes help achieve this substantially. When they can say they can come up with an idea to remind them to wear white canvas shoes on Thursdays or just pack their homework notebooks, we let them venture into their ideas. At the root of the most offbeat ideas lie solutions.
Communication
If the imagination of one kid is so contagious and exciting, visualize a place of 20 to 30 kids envisioning things together! This is the collective growth we are talking about. When kids talk, they don't just talk about cartoons or games. They talk about their moves in chess, the duration within which they solved the Rubik's cube or an interesting project they are working on. When conversations are about ideas, progress and thoughts, how cannot there be space for mental evolution?
Well, these are just a few of the ways we stand out. We have our excellent coaches and mentors, who become kids when they are around with them. We also have a tailored program structure designed to make them learn newer life skills. If you're keen on taking a personal look on how we take our classes, arrange for a free class today!