Merry Christmas, kids!

Alright, kiddos. Let's talk about why staying lively and active is so important for your brains to soak up all that smart stuff! When your body feels good, your mind can work its magic, too.

Fact: when you treat your body well with exercise and good eats, it's like giving your brain a high-five. Healthy bodies lead to sharp brains, making it easier to crush those math problems and ace that spelling test.

Your fabulous brain helps you make sense of your world. Your senses feed it information, and your brain instructs you on what to do about it. There are also many things that your brain takes care of without you having to think about them.

Okay, we have tuned our ears to listen, and we’re using our eyes to observe. Now, we need to store the stuff we’ve heard and seen. This is where our memory steps onto the field.

Our ears feed information to our brains when we listen. Of course, our eyes play a part as well. Scientists estimate that about one-third of your brain is linked to vision (your eyes). It takes a lot of brain power to make sense of what you’re seeing.

Information is pouring into our brains because we’re actively listening. Your teacher has made the classroom free of distractions so we can focus. The next thing on our learning list is processing what we hear and see.

Now that those ears are actively sending messages to your brain–you’re listening, right–it’s time to ask questions.

Let’s check what’s going on in our brains when we listen. Sounds go straight to our temporal lobe, where our gatekeeper, the hippocampus, decides whether or not to let them in.

Your listening skills are improving, right? Remember, listening is different from hearing. We hear things all the time, but our brains are good at picking what we listen to. Listening requires a focused brain–a brain that participates instead of sitting on the sidelines.

Listening takes an active brain.

Tune in with your senses. We have five that we use all the time. There are others, like that ‘gut feeling’ you have when something doesn’t feel right. You know the one–your friend shares a story with you. You’re not sure everything in the story is true. The wrong information keeps wriggling away.

Of course, you know about your senses. You use them to take notice of what’s going on around you. Your brain constantly receives information from them, which causes you to do something. Or nothing.

That nifty piece of equipment in your head is good at tuning you in. It’s just as excellent at tuning you out. I’m going to use a big word here, so tune in.

Our brains manipulate (man-ip-you-late) the messages we hear, see, taste, smell or touch.

You love vegetables, right? Or maybe not.

Listen up! How many times has your teacher said that? Or words like it? We have five basic senses–touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell. Touch is the first way we figure out what’s going on around us. Next is taste–babies touch first, then taste what they pick up.

We rely on our eyes to guide us, but our hearing and touch take over in the dark.

Let’s kick around some more stuff about learning. First, here’s an important one: your brain will never fill up. You shouldn’t worry about it overflowing. You can keep packing learning in there for the rest of your life.

Learning doesn’t just happen. Well, it does, but we have to be ready to learn. Here’s an example: could a newborn baby learn to ride a bike? The answer is … yes! Here’s another question: is a newborn baby ready to learn bike riding? Of course, the answer is no.

How do we know we’re ready to learn? Let’s jump in.

Students in my classes loved investigating. I would set aside an hour each week for them to tackle some important learning. Before anyone began, they had to write five questions about what they were investigating.

Ready to take a plunge into the depths of deep thinking? Imagine it as diving into the vast ocean of your thoughts. Remember those times when your teacher would ask you why something is the way it is? Let's take a head-first deep dive.

School is back here in Australia. Everyone has returned to their work, school, chores and thinking routine.

Are we getting a grip on deep thinking? A lot goes on inside your head when you think. Of course, you can’t feel it. Not like you feel your muscles working when you kick a footy.

It might surprise you, but the simple act of kicking a football involves a lot of decision-making.

If you live in Australia, school has restarted after the Easter vacation. Well, it has in some states. In others, you have another week. Yay! That means another week of fun. Not that school isn’t fun.

Let’s explore some more deep thinking. If you’re in Australia, you’re on holiday. There is no school, but that doesn’t mean our deep-thinking selves have gone on holiday as well. Many families go caravaning or camping over the Easter break.

The fun part about camping is setting up your space, right? No? Not for you? You prefer the beach where there are waves to ride.

Here’s something to think about. What if … there was no school? All ‘what if’ questions have easy answers. Easy if you don’t want to think too hard. ‘What if’ questions are meant to make us think, though.

Let’s dig deeper. Of course, if you think school is cool, your answer will be different from someone who finds school uncool. Okay, now we have two groups–the school is cool group, and the school is uncool group.