3 Workplace Health Promotion Ideas to Increase Productivity - Introvert Whisperer

Introvert Whisperer / 3 Workplace Health Promotion Ideas to Increase Productivity - Introvert Whisperer 3 Workplace Health Promotion Ideas to Increase Productivity Keeping employees healthy is crucial for ensuring they show up to work each day able to put their best foot forward. But as employers, it’s hard for us to recognize that health and wellness are actually a crucial part of being a great company to work for. While we may worry about our productivity levels or what should actually be included in work requirements, an appropriate wellness plan can actually help improve business and encourage employees to get more done. Including a corporate wellness plan for your employees doesn’t need to be expensive or extremely detailed. Instead, it can focus on simple changes such as keeping an office clean or encouraging healthy behaviors in fighting off colds and flus. These little changes around the office can help your employees stay healthy, ensuring they come into work each day prepared to tackle their projects and meet deadlines. Here are a few ideas on understanding what is work health and safety and how to prevent cold and flu in the workplace. 1. Keep a Clean Office If you want to prevent your employees from catching a cold or coming down with the flu, you need to understand what causes a cold. While cold-like symptoms can come just from the weather changing or things like allergies, of which you probably can’t avoid, a clean office or workspace prevents the spreading of contagious germs that can lead to sickness. Professional office cleaning services are usually worth the investment, even if you can only bring them in once a week. While you and your team can wipe down door knobs, keyboards, and other shared items during the week, professional cleaners get all the cracks you forget about. 2. Get Moving It may seem counterproductive to encourage your employees to get away from their desks as a method of how to increase productivity at work, but it is crucial for keeping them healthy and happy. There are many ways to promote movement at work, including pushing for walking breaks or allowing employees to take extended time away during the day to go for runs or head to the gym. When your employees focus on maintaining their health through exercising regularly, they can boost their immune system and fight off colds or the flu more easily. Additionally, getting up and away from the computer screen or desk can be refreshing on the mind, allowing employees to come back to work feeling ready to tackle the projects at hand. 3. Encourage Healthy Eating A major part of ensuring our employees don’t get sick during cold and flu season comes from eating healthy and getting the nutrients and vitamins that we need. If we see our employees grabbing fast food like cheeseburgers or pizza for lunch, they’re putting themselves at risk for getting sick â€" which decreases your productivity and can hurt business. But if there aren’t healthy options available, it can be difficult for your employees to get nutritious meals. Try to keep healthy snacks around the office that your employees can grab if they need it. Things like oranges or apples come relatively cheap at the grocery store and can provide a burst of vitamins to hungry employees, giving them energy and keeping them focused. If you have the budget, catered meals once in awhile can be a great way to ensure your employees are eating properly while also showing your care and dedication to their well-being. Our employees spend most of their weeks with us, meaning that while some employers may think health or wellness at work is something they don’t need to worry about, investing in a corporate wellness program is actually a great investment in our companies. As we train our employees to do a particular job each day, we need them to show up for work each day. Calling in sick can put the entire project behind schedule, causes other individuals to miss important due dates or deadlines, and decrease productivity. Keeping a clean office, encouraging movement and exercise throughout the day, and promoting healthy eating habits are just a few of the ways that you can encourage health and wellness in the workplace. To create a plan that fits your needs and the needs of your employees, pay attention to their habits, ask what they would find beneficial, and do whatever is in your power as their employer to help them meet those needs. As you focus on wellness, youll be surprised at the increase in productivity.

Why You Should Learn Acoustic Guitar First

Why You Should Learn Acoustic Guitar First Suzy S. Not sure whether to buy an acoustic or electric guitar for your first try at the instrument? Read on as Corona, CA teacher  Milton J.  shares his expert advice Deciding on which guitar to start with is a big step. Not only do you want to feel comfortable with playing guitar for the first time, but you also want to suit your musical tastes, style, and aptitude. So should you learn to play acoustic guitar first? Or go straight to the electric, if your style leans more toward Hendrix? There is, in fact, a best choice and that is the acoustic. Acoustic Guitars Help With Initial Technique The thicker strings and neck on the acoustic guitar will promote the building of finger strength. This will come into play as you continue to learn proper fingering technique, chords, and strum patterns. Moreover, learning rhythm, and the aforementioned strum pattern â€" the up-and-down motion of striking the strings that creates the main sound of the guitar â€" is easier and more conducive to successful repetition on the acoustic guitar. As you move to the intermediate stage after learning fingering technique, chords, and basic songs, understanding how to utilize the strum pattern as a percussive technique transforms the acoustic guitar into a drum and melody instrument. This opens up the stylistic interpretations of various songs you may learn along the way tremendously! One common misconception prospective guitar players make when choosing which acoustic guitar to purchase start with the question, “Which guitar will be the easiest to play?” I feel this is the wrong question to ask. Try starting with the questions, “Which guitar feels most comfortable for me?” and “Which guitar fits into my budget?” Once you understand those parameters, you’ll find the best acoustic guitar for you to start with. Acoustic Guitars Offer Portability Lastly, the acoustic guitar’s portability will promote more playing, possibly in places away from home. The more possibilities you have early on for playing your new guitar in addition to your lessons, the better. I encourage you to take your guitar to a nice area at your local park, in your backyard or apartment balcony, or with you on that camping trip in order to receive a new perspective instead of just your teacher’s studio or your bedroom. This will help you appreciate your new instrument even more. Now, it’s time to rock out! Find your nearest guitar teacher, garner advice from him or her on where to purchase or rent your first guitar, and use this as a guide as you learn to play acoustic guitar! Have fun! Milton K. teaches guitar, piano, singing, music recording, music theory, opera voice, songwriting, speaking voice, and acting lessons in  Corona, CA. He specializes in classical, RB, soul, pop, rock, jazz, and opera styles. Learn more about Milton here! Interested in Private Lessons? Search thousands of teachers for local and live, online lessons. Sign up for convenient, affordable private lessons today! Search for Your Teacher Photo  by  simon_music

3 Ways Parents Can Help Their Child With Algebra

3 Ways Parents Can Help Their Child With Algebra Algebra is a challenging subject for many students. Yet algebra is not as difficult as some students believe it may just take more time and attention for some students to learn the basic concepts of algebra 1 and/or algebra 2. Heres how you can providealgebra helpto your child. Practice Problems -Repetition is the key to understanding algebra properly. Have your student redo word problems that they have had difficulties with on previous quizzes or tests. Then, move on to otheralgebra problems in their text book that are similar. Some students learn better through practice instead of conceptually. Make sure to only do algebra problems to which you have the answer key so you can correct your students work. Mobile Apps -Technology might be the key to helping your child understandalgebraic equations. Many algebra-based apps are available on sites like iTunes for free. The U.S. Department of Education donated $740,000 to the Center for Algebraic Thinking to create these apps in the hope of aiding struggling students. Apps are an alternative for students to practice once they understand the initial principles. These free apps provide practice problems with the answer keys built in. Check to see if any algebra apps on iTunes can help your student. Talk with your Childs Teacher -Chat with the teacher to better understand your childs progress. As a professional educator, theyll convey your students weak points and possibly offer you tips on how to help them outside of class. Your student might have trouble with word problems, but understand solving quadratic equations. This information will help your strategy and if you ultimately decide to seek tutoring help, you will be able to speak knowledgably about what areas are causing the most concern for your child. Overall, if you feel your child is having trouble gaining traction in algebra 1 and/or algebra 2, seek tutoring help. The professional tutors at Huntington Learning Center are able to explain subjects in ways that make the most sense to students. Your childs education is vital to their future, so intervene early if you see problems. Huntington Learning Center helps students with homework, as well as quiz and test preparation, so your student can build a better future today.

Making the Tutorfair TV Ad

Making the Tutorfair TV Ad We filmed our very first TV advert at Bishop Challoner Catholic Collegiate School (BCCCS) on Commercial Road, back in November 2015. Our ad will air in January, watch it below! BCCCS is a Tutorfair Foundation partner school, The head teacher Nick Soar, kindly lent us an Art room, a Maths room, and their Library for filming. We also had some of BCCCS’s best drama students and teachers take part on the day, who are the stars of our TV ad! Scene 1: The “Primary Class” In my opinion this is the best scene in the Tutorfair TV ad, maybe because it was the most elaborate scene we filmed, the first scene we filmed and the opening scene in the ad! Before 9am the Year 7 students had already been to hair and make-up (with Bella the make-up artist), taken their seats and practiced the scene a few times before filming! The girls and boys were all giggling and chatting away; the energy in the room was fantastic! Isabella, the star of this scene, plays a student who has missed something in class. After a few more trial runs, Mike the director calls out “Film rolling? OK, action!” Bringing home the reality that we were on a REAL film set! Very. Exciting. The class teacher asks the class “How does Tommo feel about Charlie and Molly?” This question I later discovered, referred to the book called “Private Peaceful” that the students were reading for English Literature. Isabella’s classmates all raise their hands to answer, whilst Isabella shows off her top acting skills and plays a student who feels a little left behind. It’s surprisingly difficult to act without speaking, without overacting or under-acting, with all the lights shinning on you, a fluffy microphone boom above your head, and no less than 9 “grown-ups” standing behind the camera staring at you! So we were all more than impressed with Isabella’s composure, relaxed attitude and expert drama skills, as she didn’t need much direction at all! #nailedit Isabella is in fact one of BCCCS’s top year 7 students; she reads one book every week, loves story writing and problem solving, aims to take her GCSEs early, and in her spare time she is a pro-baton twirler! When asked if she was enjoying the day, she exclaimed “Yes! I am really loving all the attention!” as she really was the leading lady! Personally, my wow moment was when I saw the camera platform, which was attached to a track on the floor. When “action” was called, it was slowly pushed to the right by the camera assistant, which gives the scene a slow and steady panning effect across the classroom. Simple things… But I was dying to have a go! In the final edit of the television ad, this scene is only a few seconds long, but it took roughly 2.5 hours to set up and film, with the class practicing and repeating the scene roughly 10 to 12 times! So by the end of the filming I was desperate to find out for myself how “Tommo was feeling about Charlie and Molly”! Scenes at Home Before the filming day we visited BCCCS and chose some rooms to film in. One of the rooms chosen was the staff meeting room. As we saw the room during half term, it was being repainted and was largely empty. We chose this room to film all the “home tuition” scenes in. Once we'd finished filming the first scene, we walked over to the staff meeting room to set up the next scenes. When we opened the door and we were faced with a huge (brand new) boardroom style table that filled the room and was screwed into the floor... There was no moving that table, we had to think of another option! Thinking on our feet, we had an idea, and went to the Library! We hadn’t arranged to be in the library until after lunch, so the students studying that morning were kindly keeping quiet, but we heard giggles as they watched what could only be described as a very budget episode of “changing rooms” as we TRANSFORMED a corner of the Library into a “home”. We used vases, flowers, a tree, a sofa (I still don’t know where that came from!), a rug bought from the local market, and even hung some fabric as if they were curtains! Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen would have been proud… In the Library “home” we filmed: - The private tutoring scene with Isabella and Mark Maclaine. - The scene with Isabella and her “mum” choosing a tutor, who was played by Rachel from the education company, Spiral. - The scene with the older teen boy, and Madeleine (one of Tutorfair’s top tutors) We then rearranged the Library to look more like a Library again, and filmed student Victoria, with Peter Kirby the director of the Tutorfair Foundation. This appears as the final scene in our TV ad! By this time (due to the time spent making a house in the library), we had run over schedule and it was home-time for most students - Yet we still had one more scene to film in the Maths room. We only had 4 GCSE students to make a full classroom scene, so we needed to find more extras to take part. I was then asked to put on a blue shirt, along with my college Sebastian, and sit in the back of the classroom as a student! Being over 10 years older than my classroom peers, I felt quite flattered to play the role! We were asked to calculate the area of a circle…  â€œAha! Of course! A = pr ²   I knew that… This scene only took around 5 takes and that was a wrap! It all came to an end so quickly, but I had such a truly incredible experience, as did the students and teachers of BCCCS. We would like to thank Nick Soar, James who coordinated EVERYTHING, and the Dancing Aardvarks. Special thanks to the teachers and students who brought the ad to life!

The 5 best mnemonics

The 5 best mnemonics Mnemonics are memory aids. They are sometimes a single sentence, sometimes entire paragraphs. An English tutor friend of mine told me that he invented a labyrinthine mental trail around Canterbury Cathedral, populated by characters which he then taught to his students to help them recall the order of the Canterbury Tales. My personal favourite was a woman having a bath in the font, with a frying pan - the Wife of Bath followed by the Friar's Tale. Here are my top five mnemonics - the classics, mostly tried and tested from years of overseeing exam revision classes. What other mnemonics have you used with students - and to what degree of success? 1. Physics - My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets: Take the first letter of each word, to get the first letter of the planets, in order. Of course now Pluto is no longer a planet this one is slightly outdated - but hard to beat! 2. Music - Every Good Boy Deserves Football+ FACE: A similar theory to the naming of the planets, the former is a single letter for each line of music on the sheet, the latter for the gaps between. 3. History - Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: The fate of the six wives of Henry VIII in a nutshell. This one works by expansion - once you know the destiny of the six women - it becomes easier to remember who is who. 4. Biology - Kids Playing Carelessly On Freeways Get Squashed: Otherwise known as the scientific classification of the species: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. 5. Geography - Never Eat Shredded Wheat - Simple, but effective, this first letter mnemonic helps students to remember the cardinal points of the compass, in order.

5 Best Apps for Roommate Harmony

5 Best Apps for Roommate Harmony Image via: www.pexels.com 1.  Splitwise When you are living with other people, the finances of the house are bound to get a bit jumbled. Splitwise is a simple way to organize expenses and share bills with your roommates. By creating a group, you and your roommates will be able to stay connected while also keeping track of how much money is owed and who that money is owed to. Splitwise also offers email notifications to kindly remind you and your roommates of due charges. Say goodbye to awkward tension and utter financial bedlam. 2.  IOU Let’s be real. Everybody hates debt. All of us hate taking out student loans knowing we will eventually need to pay them back. The only thing worse than owing debt is owing debt to a friend, or worse, a roommate. As a student, you eventually forget how many times your roommate has picked up the tab at dinner, or treated you to a movie after a tough exam. After all, you have a ton on your plate too. However, this might pose some problems for the roommate relationship if your roommate should mistake your forgetfulness for negligence. IOU is here to save the day! The app will allow you to keep track of your debts, bills, and loans. It will send you notifications about upcoming and overdue debts should you forget. Also, it works on the flip side. Does your roommate owe you money for dinner or a movie? IOU will send email reminders to them as well, while also keeping a record of your financial history. Image via: www.pexels.com 3. Chorma Did your parents ever set up a rewards system for whatever chores you did in the house? Or, were you like me in the sense that living in a house was the reward for completing chores? Either way, Chorma is here to organize and add incentive to keeping up the pristine levels around the place. The app provides a simple and rewarding way to keep up with chores around the house. The app allows you to assign or claim responsibilities around the house and do you want to know the best part? By doing chores, you gain “Chorma” points which you can redeem for rewards! Let the roommate competition toward the cleanest and most organized space begin! 4.  Chooserr This next app is exclusively for those of you who have stellar relationships with your roommates. I’m talking SpongeBob and Patrick best friends in harmony kind of stellar. If that isn’t you and your roomie, you might want to reconsider this one. Chooserr will allow you to turn a bleak and depressing task like assigning chores and divvying up expenses and turn it into a game. The game is simple. First, you have to create the task. It could be something as simple as “Who should have control over the TV remote for the next hour?” or something as dastardly as “Who should scrub out the toilet this week?” Chooserr will pick the winner (or loser) to make sure that the results are completely unbiased. Another way to play is with “Not It!” This mode encourages a little bit of competition. First, you create the task, but the last person to press “Not It!” is the loser. The app will allow up to three friends (unlimited for $0.99!) to compete. Group chat messengers also add to the experience where you can gloat or whine about the results. Image via: www.pexels.com 5.  OurGroceries Nothing is worse than coming home from the grocery store to find that the milk has just run out, or someone drank the last sip of juice in the house. Even if this is not something you have personally experienced, anyone can agree that keeping track of groceries in a shared household can be a challenge. Fortunately for us, OurGroceries is here to bridge the gap. The app creates a single grocery list for the entire household and every member of the household has the ability to make changes to this list. Once a change is made, everyone in the household sees it. For instance, imagine that you’ve just left for class and you’ve taken the last protein bar in the box. You can use OurGroceries to indicate that the household needs more protein bars. Someone else in your household could be at the store where they will pick up more protein bars and perhaps whatever else is on the list. It’s a perfectly simple way to make sure you and your roommates have whatever you need to keep your pantry stocked.

5 Ways to Make a Biography Report Fun - by TutorNerds

5 Ways to Make a Biography Report Fun - by TutorNerds Orange County English Tutoring Tips: 5 ways to make a biography report fun Most elementary school kids will write a biography of a historical figure at some point during the year. This is an important assignment that teaches kids many lessons including the difference between fiction and non-fiction reading, history, political science, civil rights movements, and so on. However, some biography reports can be dry in that kids are reading about facts and dates rather than immersing themselves in a fiction story about intrigue an adventure. However, there are some ways to make a biography report fun and exciting and also help a student learn about the importance of the figure assigned to them get a high grade on your biography report with the help of Orange County English tutoring from TutorNerds. 1.   Choose a person youre interested in Usually, students get to choose from a few different historical figures when writing a biography. Most students wont know too much about their choices until they pick one and get started. Unfortunately, sometimes the person they chose is not especially interesting to them for one reason or another, and they lose interest in the assignment altogether. Its worth it to help kids do a little bit of preliminary research on their different choices so they can choose to write about someone they think is cool. This can make the assignment more fun overall and help encourage the student to be independent and research on their own. 2. Gather age-appropriate resources There are several resources available geared especially towards elementary school students that use language and vocabulary they can understand. Also, these resources often condense complicated information into smaller paragraphs. When researching, students often find material that is meant for an older audience, which can make it harder to understand. School libraries and websites recommended by the classroom teacher can be helpful for these types of assignments. Parents can also help kids look for visual resources that give them an idea of what it was like to live in the period and country of the subject. 3. Add a creative element Most teachers will allow students to draw a picture of the subject of their biography or even of an imaginary setting from the time the person lived. Sometimes this is a required part of the assignment, but more often than not its extra credit, which is why many students dont do it. However, adding a creative element can help maintain the interest of a younger student and give them a well-rounded educational experience. Additionally, a little bit of extra credit can always be helpful to keep a student’s GPA high at any age. 4. Ask why Most students already know about the five Ws â€" who, what, when, where, and why â€" but the most important one to focus on is the last. Students should be asking themselves why a person did what they did, why did they react in a certain way, why did they become famous or infamous? When students ask why it sparks their mind to dig deeper and think about the situation at hand (READ: 5 Tips for Success in English). 5. Understand the context If a student is writing about somebody who lived a long time ago, they might not yet understand the context in which the person lived. Something thats not a big deal today might have been a really important contribution 100 or 200 years ago. What is commonplace in modern times might have been unique when the person was living. It’s helpful if students at this age can learn context from a parent or tutor before they get into all of the details of a biography assignment. Whether you’re in high school or college, do well in your English classes with the help of private Orange County English tutoring from TutorNerds. All blog entries, with the exception of guest bloggers, are written by Tutor Nerds. Are you an education professional? If so, email us at pr@tutornerds.com for guest blogging and collaborations. We want to make this the best free education resource in SoCal, so feel free to suggest what you would like to see us write.