50 Compliments for National Compliment Day!

Thursday, January 24, 2019 is National Compliment Day here in the United States. So, it is time to remember to look for the special in everyone and be brave enough to tell them why they are awesome!

When one thinks of compliments, often the most common ones would be similar to, "You are very pretty." or "I like your hair." With National Compliment Day coming, I decided that I could do better and decided to come up with my list of compliments that might just mean more and comment on more than just the outside of a person.

Now, complimenting someone that you have never meant doesn't leave you with many options, so the normal compliments will still work. However, if you are complimenting someone you know, try to dig a little deeper to tell them what really makes them special!

50 Compliments:

1. I love how you make me laugh!
2. You are an awesome friend.
3. I like your style.
4. You are the most perfect you there is!
5. You bring out the best in people.
6. I love how you think.
7. You are so quirky and I think it's great!
8. You are such a blessing!
9. Your creativity is inspiring!
10. You make my days more exciting!
11. You are very smart.
12. We make a great team!
13. You are awesome!
14. You make a difference everywhere you go.
15. I admire how kind you are.
16. I love how you never give up!
17. I like the way you try your best.
18. You tell funny jokes.
19. It makes me smile when you sit with me at lunch.
20. I love your laugh.
21. You have great ideas.
22. You are a good listener
23. You give the best hugs!
24. You put together the best outfits!
25. I'm so happy you are my friend. 
    
26. I think you are unstoppable!
27. I wish more people were like you.
28. You have great taste in music.
29. I like your dance moves!
30. Your happiness is contagious.
31. You are unique!
32. You are an inspiration.
33. I like how relaxed you are.
34. It is great how organized you can be!
35. I appreciate you.
36. You are one smart cookie!
37. Your manners are perfect!
38. You are strong.
39. I'm happy that I know you.
40. You are important in my life.
41. You should be proud of yourself.
42. You are always there for me.
43. You are making a difference.
44. You deserve a hug right now.
45. You light up the room.
46. I'm so lucky that you are my friend.
47. I like you just as you are.
48. You have the best attitude.
49. I like the way you treat your friends.
50. I like that you always have a smile.

I hope you can use some or ALL of these in the upcoming days. Here are some other resources that will help bring compliments to the classroom! 

Helping Students Give Effective Compliments

Compliments and Feelings (Activity for 4 - 8 year olds)

Compliments Lesson Plan

How to Give Compliments Book (Free download!!)

If you have other ideas on learning about and sharing compliments, please leave them in the comments below! You guys are awesome, and just the fact that you are reading this makes me smile!

From Way Back When...

It has been many years since I graduated college with an Animation degree. Since then, I have made over 350 games and countless animations. But, this morning I started going through some older folders on my computer to clean things up a bit, and ran into some rather fun finds from the past! I thought you all might enjoy seeing some of the first games and animations that I made.

I was always interested in education, whether it was math, art, creativity, or manners, so most of my projects were created with that in mind. The first one I want to share is my Cartooning 101 project. We had to create a page that had several buttons that made different things happen as well as having a lip-synced character and drag and drop abilities. Now, I will apologize right now about the audio.... it is pretty terrible, but it was created in 2005. But, I hope you can enjoy a look back to my beginnings and maybe even learn something, even with the audio issues. Let me know what you think. If you want to see more of my starting project, just let me know in the comments.

If for some reason, the movie does not appear above... you can follow this link to play it. 

Cartooning Project

Fun4theBrain - This School Year

Quick summary of what is in this Start of the School Year message:
- new games
- old games
- a whole new world (don't you dare close your eyes haha)
 Keep reading for more details....

Ten years ago, I started creating educational games and sharing them on my website. Back then it was called Exuberant Games! Then, on March 12, 2009, I opened Fun4theBrain! After over 24 million visitors and 250 million game plays, Fun4theBrain is still here! The past 8 years have had many ups and downs and brought many drastic changes in technology. With these changes comes the need for Fun4theBrain to alter how it does things. While I would love to keep things the same, technology will not allow me to grow stagnant, and that is a good thing. So, I am off to learn new programming languages so that you will be able to play Fun4theBrain games everywhere.

Old Games - I will be converting my old games into HTML5 compliant formats as quickly as I can. I am still hoping to be able to complete a new game each month, but it may be a month and a half with an updated game in between each.

New Games - I am going to do my best to keep you informed of smaller progress so you all can be as excited about the new games as I am. I have started using a productivity program called Productive Flourishing. It is awesome and basically made for creatives who tend to have a few too many ideas running through their heads at all times. It encourages to stick with a project until there is a sharable. So, I will be attempting this now. Because of this, expect more posts and updates on the games on which I am working. I plan on sharing artwork and game ideas as I work through my normal creative process. I do hope you enjoy hearing about what goes into each of these educational games.

A Whole New World - I know how much we all love Murb; those little monsters are just so cute! With the technology changes, it will be a massive undertaking to re-do that entire town, but it will eventually get done. But, there is something new around the corner! This new world deserves a blog post all its own, so stay tuned for more information next week! (I am really excited and can't wait to share the news with you!!)

So, there you have it. This school year you can expect old math games made new, new educational games with lots of updates along the way, and a whole new world beginning! Tell your friends and enjoy Fun4theBrain!

More Artistic Interruptions of the Mind

Last week I showed you a couple of the distractions that I have been working on recently. Now, here are a couple more. The school at which I volunteer has an fundraising auction every year. Each homeroom class comes up with a project. And I have been also teaching art and have the students there working on projects as well. Last week, I revealed the Hand-carved Minion Soap set and the painted country glass set. This week, the other two projects from my art students!

The first project is an amazing chess set made by three of my students. I went to the hardware store and just grabbed a bunch of random nuts and bolts and told them to create a creative chess set. After working with them for a few class periods, they had figured out what else they needed and exactly what they wanted the chess set to look like. Then, they made all of their pieces, super glued them together and spray painted one set gold.

The chess board took a bit more creativity as they wanted it to be metal to go with the pieces, but they really wanted it to have a drawer to hold the pieces. They settled on a Keurig K-cup drawer, made to go under the Keurig coffee machine. They marked off the squares, spray painted them gold and Ta Da ...  A gorgeous Nuts & Bolts Chess Set!

I can't wait to see how it does at the auction!

I have a group of foreign exchange students from China in my class as well. They had several choices of projects to work on, but decided that they were going to make a traditional Chinese Mahjongg Set. This was a massive undertaking as they had 136 tiles to create. They chose to go with a wooden tile so they could wood burn the intricate designs. We got the wood pieces made from a listing on Etsy and then the kids set to the task. Each piece of wood needed to be sanded to give a softer feel and curved edge. Then the drawings were done and then finally, the wood burning was started. Luckily we were able to find a woodburning stamp for the circles to make the look clean. While it did take a bit longer than expected, the results were nothing short of amazing!

After the tiles were done, we had to figure an easy way for the game to be transported. Off to the craft store!! Currently there is always a large selection of giant empty books at all of the craft stores, and I have always thought they were very cool! So, I bought the biggest one I could find and it actually fit the tiles perfectly!

Absolutely awesome! I am very proud of all of my art class projects! I am looking forward to see how well they do at the auction, but even if they didn't make any money, I couldn't be happier with the hard work of my students!

Artistic Interruptions of the Mind

Recently, there are have been a high number of things distracting me from what I was considering my most important goals. However, I am now looking at all of these distractions and thought that you might just be interested in seeing what I have been up to. So, over the next couple of weeks I will let you all take a glimpse at what is going on in my head!

I volunteer teaching art at a small local high school. The school has a fundraising auction every February. I also am a class parent for the junior class. So, combining all of those, I am going to end up contributing at least 5 projects for the auction. In this article, I will tell you about two of these beautiful projects.

The first project is a beautiful glass set that a group of art students painted. It comes with a carafe and four mason jars with lids and straws. The students created patterns  of dots and lines and swirls to make the glass look festive and ready for summer fun!

 

The next project was done by a group of international students from South Korea. We took a large batch of Ivory soap bars and started sculpting away. At first, it was just for practice and play and fun. But, as we continued on, I encouraged them to find a design they could all agree on so they could make a batch of soap for the auction. 

Their final decision was to make a batch of soap in the shape of Despicable Me Minions. They turned out great! Hopefully they will bring in some money for the fundraiser. I am not sure that I could actually use them because they are so cute!

I think both projects turned out fabulously! In a few days I will show you the other two, larger projects from my art class: a chess set, and a mahjong set!

Well now you know a couple of things that have been on my mind and plate, just wait to you see the rest! 

Fun4theBrain - In the Works - September Edition

Wow! The beginning few weeks of school have gone by like a flash of lightening. I can't believe we are about to start the last week of September already! It is already time to start thinking about Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. But, before we get all caught up in the holiday fun, let me get you caught up on what has been happening around here.

In the last month, two polls have been taken to allow you to choose which school and which library would be in the next game. Those have been chosen and created and so have a great bunch of monster cars. This new game Monster Car Wash is going to be so much fun. We have had ideas of all sorts of things, from having a monster lick the car clean to having the whole thing done with one monster. In the end, I wanted to try to get as many monsters into this game as possible, but still showcasing each monster. So, each monster in this game will have a specific task to help with the car wash. It is going to be so much fun.

I believe this game will have longer game play than many of the other games in Murb. But, hopefully, that will keep your interest and allow you to have even more fun! Get ready, Monster Car Wash should be ready to play by the middle of October!!

Wanna check out some of the monster cars created for this game.....

Fun4theBrain - In the Works!

Hello everyone! It has been awhile since I have posted but wanted to let you all know what I have in the works for the site. I am going to try to create a weekly post letting you know what games, changes, or upgrades I have on the way for Fun4theBrain.com. Maybe you will even get to see some sneak peeks of what is coming.

Before I start with the update, I will begin with an apology of sorts. I am extremely ADD and because of that, I constantly have new and great ideas floating in my head that distract me from my other great ideas that I have started. I love my ADD and try to write down all of my great ideas so that one day I can get back to them. So, if one week in the In the Works post I talk about doing one project, but switch to a different one the next week, I hope you can be forgiving. I love what I do, and when you do, it is hard to not keep dreaming and planning new things. Perhaps some day in the future, I will be able to afford to hire someone to take more of my ideas to completion. For now, it is just me and my daughter working on the site, so it may be a little chaotic, but that is how I work! :o)

OK... onto the update.

Currently I am working on additional games for Murb. I still have about 10 monsters that are going to be featured in upcoming games. The next game I have planned will feature five monsters: Sasha, Flibber Jibber, Goalie, Arabella, and Tessie, the two-headed teacher! This game will take place in the not-yet-built Elementary School. Here is the storyline:

The Murb Library is in the process of being built, but they do not yet have enough books to fill the shelves. So, the Tessie, the two-headed teacher, from the Murb Elementary School next door is organizing a huge fundraiser for the library. It is going to be a Monster Car Wash!! Tessie is planning the event, Sasha is in charge of marketing, and Flibber Jibber, Goalie, and Arabella, are in charge of washing the cars. And who knows which other monsters will be seen driving their cars into the Monster Car Wash!? We need to reach our goal for donations in order for the library to open, so, the better and faster the car is washed, the better the donations!

For this game, there is a lot of art work that needs to be done and quite a bit of coding. Soon you will see some of the sketches I have come up with for the school and library. By next week, I hope to have them completed, as well as be able to show you some of the sketches for the monster cars that will be getting washed!

Well, I will keep you posted on the game. I am also quite busy trying to figure how to get my games onto the iPad for the classrooms who will be using the iPads exclusively soon. That is a major undertaking!

I will write more later. :o)

Hey everyone, it is time now to vote on which school is your favorite. Check out the poll at http://www.fun4thebrain.com.