Posted on Category:Guides

5 Easy Exercises for Kids to be Fit

A report by WHO found that even before the lockdown, 4 out of 5 teens were not registering enough exercise and physical activity, with the most alarming rates observed in Asian countries, including India and Korea.

It’s important to know that staying fit and active is important for the younger ones too staying at home. Guidelines suggest that kids who start exercising since a young age are at a lesser risk for developing Type-2 diabetes, Cancer, maintain weight, strengthen bones and the brains as well as ward off the risk for developing other lifestyle diseases. It is crucial that children spend a minim of 30-45 minutes each day indulging in any kind of physical activity.

Even though the little ones don’t need to engage in physically strenuous exercises or follow fancy online workouts, here are five such playful exercises kids can do sitting at home without having to move out.

1. Squats
While squats are a must-do exercise for any adult, the benefits extend to children as well. Regular practice of squats can build strength, endurance, help them stay in shape and you will be surprised to know how easily kids can do this. If you want to make it a little simpler for them, use a stool but encourage them to let their body touch the surface and quickly stand up.

2. Skipping rope exercise

If you have a skipping rope at home, there’s no better workout for the kids (as well as the adults) to do than this. It is a simple tool to work out the entire body, get the heart rate up and improve coordination and balance. Not to forget, it’s super fun and engaging for the little ones.

3. Crab walk

One of the easiest and the most exercises to do, this simply requires a child to sit with their hands backwards, legs in the front and crawl through like a crab. While it might look funny, a crab walk helps a growing child develop core muscles and strength in the legs and the arms.

4. Jumping jacks
Jumping jacks are a fun way of teaching your children agility and multidirectional movement at an early age. It is ideal for kids over the age of 6.

Get them to stand upright, arms on the sides. Tell them to bend slightly and jump and slowly, spread the legs apart and extend the arms over the head. Post this, get back to the start position and repeat.

5. Cat-cow stretch

Mastering the cat-cow stretch is a fun yogic move for all age groups and an extremely beneficial one. In fact, getting your kids to start doing yoga at a young age can improve strength, coordination and promote calmness. This yoga posture enhances mobility and strengthens core back muscles, which is essential during the development stage.

Posted on Category:Fun & Trivias

Can your Teeth become your Headphones?

Ears can pick up sounds, but so can teeth! Why not try it out yourself!

What you will need

  • Metal Fork
  • Metal Spoon

What to do

  • With your thumb and index finger, hold a metal fork gently by the middle of the handle.
  • Bang a metal spoon against the tine end of the fork and you will hear a little sound.
  • As the sound fades, put the fork’s handle between your front teeth and grip it (gently!) with your teeth. Don’t
  • let your lips or tongue touch it. You’ll hear a sound again, through your teeth!
  • Why do you think this happens? Think of your own best answer, then read our explanation below.

How it Works

Solid things, like teeth, carry sound better than air does. Your teeth pick up the vibrations that are still in the fork but are too faint for your ears to hear.

 

Posted on Category:Fun & Trivias

How do Colors get their names?

Have you ever wondered where the names of the colors come from? The Universal colors are of course black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. Live Science points out that these are the primary colors seen and named in various cultures. This may be because people see the wavelengths of these colors first. Of course, not every culture has names for even the primary colors.

Black and white seem to be the most common colors, with terms relating to them across most cultures and countries. Even in cultures with 11 basic colors, like the United States, it’s often only the basics that are named. But there are many colors which have derived their names from all sorts of places—from people, food, and drink items, to other languages, animals and bugs, nature and plants, and anything people can think up to call a color. Some have strange names, and some have elegant ones. Find below a few interesting colors-

  • Alice Blue: This is a pale grayish-blue color that may be named after Alice Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s oldest daughter. It’s actual origin isn’t confirmed, however.
  • Cerise: Cerise, a color also known as “Fashion Fuchsia,” gets its name from the French meaning of the word.
  • Cerise means cherry. The color is described as a deep reddish-pink.
  • Fuchsia: The original fuchsia color gets its name from the flower of the fuchsia plant. The plants itself got its name from a botanist in the sixteenth century, Leonhard Fuchs.
  • Prussian Blue: Another color with multiple names, Prussian Blue, is also known as Berlin Blue. The color was initially discovered in Berlin but was then used to color the uniforms of the Prussian army.
  • Puce: Puce is French for flea, the bug that torments household pets, and wild animals. The reddish-brown color resembles that of the nuisance insect. The bug and the name of the color both sound gross.
  • Tyrian Purple: Royal Purple is another name for Tyrian Purple, a color named for the city of Tyre by the ancient Phoenicians. The “Royal” moniker comes from the fact that the color was expensive and only the wealthy were able to afford it.
  • Zinnwaldite: Zinnwaldite is named for the beige mineral that shares its shade.
Posted on Category:Guides

How to make a Paper Bag

Paper Bag Origami

Paper bags are widely used for carrying gift items, dresses and others. These could be simple or decorated and vary in sizes. Infact, plastic bags are now replaced by paper bags. If you are a creative person and passionate of art of paper folding or origami, then you are the right person to make it within few minutes!

Material Required

Papers used for the purpose could be newspapers, coloured papers and so on. You can use paper according to your own choice. Besides, you need a scissor, scale, pencil, glue, colours, ribbons, and other decorative items as per requirement.

10 Steps to make a Paper Bag

  • Place the cut out paper in front on a flat surface.
  • The paper should be placed in landscape orientation or long sides up and down; short sides to the left and right. Decorated papers should be faced down.
  • Then the bottom edge of the paper should be folded (2inches).
  • The fold should be creased sharply. This end would become the bottom of the bag when unfolded.
  • The next step is to locate the centre points of the top and bottom edges. Here, you must maintain the landscape orientation. Bring the short sides together as though you were folding the whole thing in half. You pinch the top and bottom of the portion to be folded and mark the centre of each long side with a pencil. Then mark a half inch to the left and right of each centre point. In total there should be six points of which three lies in the centre of one long edge and rest on the other.
  • Now fold the sides of the bag into place. You must bring the right edge of the paper to the left – most marked lines and then fold. Crease the fold and unfold it. Repeat the process inversely on the opposite side. You flip the paper over and re-fold its left and right sides downward towards the centre. Glue them at the place where they overlap. Then you fold along the same lines as before (but note that the folds will be inverted. Let the glue dry completely.
  • Then you flip the bag over .The glued side should be down. It should be placed in such way so that one of the open ends points toward you.
  • You fold the side and creases inward to give an accordion effect. Make the sides so that it becomes a rectangle when it opens up. Then mark 1.5 inches inwards from the left- hand side of the bag. You push the left side crease of the bag inwards towards the interior of the bag. Do this until the left hand mark made previously sits on the outer edge where the paper is bending. First you press and fold the paper downwards so that the mark lines up with the new folded edge. Keep the top and bottom edges symmetrical at the time of pressing the paper down. Repeat the process on the right hand side. Then the body of the bag should be folded inwards on either side like a grocery shopping bag.
  • Now you make the bottom of the bag. First determine which end is the bottom by looking at the crease lines and keep the bag flattened. You fold the bag up (4 inches) from the bottom and crease it along this line. You must see that the inward flaring creases should pop open and forms a square edge. Inside, you will find a triangle of folded paper on either side. You fold few sides to the centre by using triangular shape. Bottom should be closed off properly.
  • Make holes and add handles.
Posted on Category:Fun & Trivias

Who invented the Homework?

Homework was invented by Roberto Nevilis in 1095 in the city of Venice. All the credit mostly goes to Roberto Nevilis for being one of the first to give homework. There might have been others, but there is no evidence or recordings of them.

According to Roberto Nevilis, who invented school and homework, this academic task provides the student with the opportunity:

  • to work without haste;
  • to study with no outside estimation;
  • to choose the optimal rhythm (hours) of work;
  • to independently plan the course of work;
  • to involve all necessary sources of information.

In fact homework was introduced during the same time as the formal school system. In that time only well-to-do people had leisure of education and Nevilis wanted that his pupils should fully understand and embrace the lessons they learnt. Since formal educational system was developed at the same time as homework it became a part of it in European countries.

In the United States educational was not taken seriously till the 20th century. It was taken as a nuisance since children were needed at home to support their family instead of being involved with studies. But after the 2nd World War the mindset of people changed when the World stated needing more people with educational qualification to help with problem around the Globe.

Posted on Category:Fun & Trivias

Know Your Alphabet! Here’s A Little Something About Each Letter

Have you ever wondered about how these alphabets came to be or what their secret story is? Well, hop in for a ride to know about some little known stories of the alphabets that allows you to communicate!

A: The capital A hasn’t always looked the way it does now. In ancient Semitic languages, the letter was upside down, which created a symbol that resembled a steer with horns.

B: Grab paper and pen and start writing down every number as a word. Do you notice one missing letter? If you kept going, you wouldn’t use a single letter b until you reached one billion.

C: Benjamin Franklin wanted to banish c from the alphabet—along with j, q, w, x and y—and replace them with six letters he’d invented himself. He claimed that he could simplify the En­glish language.

D: Contrary to popular belief, the D in D-day does not stand for ‘doom’ or ‘death’—it stands for ‘day’. The US military marks important operations and invasions with a D as a placeholder. (So the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 was D-1.)

E: Meet the ‘Smith’ of the English alphabet—e is used more often than any other letter. It appears in 11 per cent of all words, according to an analysis of over 2,40,000 entries in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

F: Anyone educated in today’s school system knows that the lowest grade you can get is an F. The low-water mark, however, used to be represented by the letter E. When Mount Holyoke College administrators re­designed the grading system in 1898, professors worried that students would think the grade meant ‘excellent’. F more obviously stands for ‘fail’.

G: Both g and c were originally represented by the Phoenician symbol gimel, which meant camel. It was the Romans who finally separated the two  letters, letting c keep its shape and adding a bar for the letter g.

H: The Brits have long had an h hang-up, according to Michael Rosen, author of Alphabetical: How Every Le-tter Tells a Story. They pronounce h two ways: ‘aitch’ and ‘haitch’. Accents that dropped the h from words were once considered ‘lower class’, Rosen writes. And in Northern Ireland, pronunciation distinguished Catholics (‘haitch’) from Protestants (‘aitch’).

I: Funnily enough, the dot over the letters i and j has a funny-sounding name: It’s called a tittle.

J: This is one of the two letters that do not appear on the periodic table. (Q is the other.) Invented in the 1500s by an Italian, j was also one of the last letters to be added to the alphabet.

K: With the possible exception of l (see below), k is the most notorious letter in sports. It’s how baseball fans record a strikeout. (When the first box score was written back in 1859, s was used to indicate a sacrifice; k was plucked from the end of ‘struck’.)

L: The National Football League has traditionally used Roman ­numerals to denote the number of the Big Game, but for the 50th Super Bowl, they decided to go with just the number 50. Why? Sports fans use the letters w and l as shorthand for ‘win’ and ‘loss’. Because the Roman numeral for 50 is L, the NFL worried that Super Bowl L would be, in PR terms, a big loser.

M: You can’t say the letter m without your lips touching. Go ahead and try it!

N: The letter n was originally associated with water—the Phoenician word for n was ‘nun’, which later became the Aramaic word for ‘fish’. In fact, the capital N got its shape because it was a pictorial representation of a crashing wave.

O: Only four letters (a, e, l, o) are doubled at the beginning of a word (aardvark, eel, llama, ooze, etc.), and more words start with double o in English than with any other pair.

P: This may be the most versatile letter in English. It’s the only consonant that needs no help in forming a word sandwich with any vowel: pap, pep, pip, pop, pup.

Q: One out of every 510 letters in English words is a q, making it the least common letter in the English alphabet, according to a Concise Oxford English Dictionary analysis.

R: Sometimes referred to as the littera canina, or the ‘canine letter’, because Latin speakers trilling it sound like a growling dog, r gets a shout-out from William Shakespeare in ­Romeo and Juliet when Juliet’s nurse calls the letter “the dog’s name” in act 2, scene 4.

S: The English alphabet briefly included a letter called a ‘long s’. Used from the late Renaissance to the early 1800s, it resembled the letter f but was pronounced as an s. You’ll see it in various manuscripts written by the [American] Founding Fathers, including the Bill of Rights.

T: The term ‘T-shirt’ refers to the T shape of the garment’s body and sleeves. F. Scott Fitzgerald is believed to be the first to use the term in popular culture, in 1920, when the main character in his novel This Side of Paradise brings a T-shirt with him to boarding school.

U: Before the 1500s, u and v were used interchangeably as a vowel or a consonant. A French educational reformer helped change that in 1557 when he started using u exclusively as a vowel and v as the consonant.

V: This is the only letter in the En­glish language that is never silent. Even usually conspicuous letters such as j and z are silent in words we have borrowed from foreign languages, such as marijuana (originally  a Spanish word) and laissez-­faire (French).

W: Ever wonder why we call it a double-u instead of double-v? The Latin alphabet did not have a letter to represent the w sound in Old En­glish, so seventh-­century scribes just wrote it as uu. The double-u symbol eventually meshed together to form the letter w.

X: From ‘X marks the spot’ to ‘solve for x’, this is the go-to letter to represent something unknown. The idea is believed to have come from mathematician René Descartes, who used the last three letters of the alphabet to represent unknown quantities in his book The Geometry. He chose a, b and c to stand for known quantities.

Y: The switch-hitter in the alphabet, y functions as both a vowel and a consonant. The Oxford English Dictionary actually calls it a semivowel because while the letter stops your breath in words such as yell and young—making it a consonant—it also creates an open vocal sound in words such as myth or hymn.

Z: Believe it or not, the letter z has not always been the last letter of the alphabet. For a time, the Greeks had zeta in a respectable place at number seven.