Hello friends,

    This is Christmas Week, when you may have any emotions of happiness or sadness, pain or panic, fears or frustrations. Put the negative emotions aside and focus on building better relationships with our tips below.

    Relationship Tips for Getting Along at the Holidays

    1). Speak Your Love in Words. The best gift you can give another person is words of praise, thankfulness, and appreciation from your lips.

    2). Hear What Your Friends and Family are Voicing Their Stress. Listen carefully to those around you -- a gift that will lower their stress.

    3). Center Your Heart. Focus on the true, deeper meaning of the holiday season. This will help everyone become easier to get along with because the heart of Christmas will remain whole.

    4). Ask those who are celebrating with you what their expectations are. Communicate the plans clearly so people feel informed.

    5). Be prepared for changes. Don't be a Christmas Scrooge ordering family around. Instead slow the pace, be agreeable, and give choices so that you create an environment of connecting and sharing.

    6). Take Time for being Romantic. The greatest gift you can give your husband or wife, children, and friends is harmony at home.

    7). Express Your Joy. Make memories (and take lots of pictures) by making the most of all your relationships. Capture the best moments with your camera.

    Get the rest of the10 Holiday Tips from each of 14 Experts like this in Simplify Your Holiday Season, available HERE. Get one of the 50 free copies on a first-come, first-served basis or a 50% discount off $30 by Jan 1.2017.

    Mark Your Calendar（日历） for January 4 & 5 our free next online workshop "New Year, New You: Maximize Your Time, Minimize Your Weight."

    Have a very lovely Christmas and Happy New Year! I hope I prepared you well for Christmas, since over 1,000 people downloaded my 8 week Holiday Plan. I hope you were one of them and are peaceful and ready.

Warmly,

Marcia Ramsland, The Holiday Coach

www.OrganizingPro.com/Holidays

"Coaching Busy People to Make Every Day Count!"

    Are you suffering from FOMO—that is, Fear Of Missing Out? Research shows that a growing number of young people are, with worrying consequences for their sleep and schoolwork.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#}You aren't able to do your best unless you sleep well. Most experts agree that the optimum(最适宜) number of hours is eight, and this has been accepted as common sense for as long as I can remember. However, I was young once and know most of you get much less sleep than that.

    I read an interesting article in a teachers' magazine recently.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}Worryingly, the results showed that teenagers are facing a new problem. They may go to bed and get up at appropriate times, but a growing number are waking up in the middle of the night, not to use the bathroom or have a snack, but because of FOMO.

    According to the article, the number of students waking up during the night to check social media is growing. Afraid of missing a comment or opportunity to take part in a chat, teenagers are waking at all times of the night, going online and getting involved.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    Experts are worried about this growing trend and the report reveals some worrying statistics: 23% of 12-to 15-year-olds wake up nearly every night to use social media.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}One in third of the students are constantly tired and unable to function to their full capacity.

    So I'd like to ask you to be responsible when it comes to social media. Switch off your devices at night. The world won't end and your social media will be waiting to greet you in the morning!{#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A.But things are getting out of hand.

B.They did a study of 848 students in Wales.

C.Another 15% wake up at night once a week for the same reason.

D.I give you my word that you won't have missed anything important.

E.All happens when they should be sound asleep.

F.FOMO is the fear that everyone else is having more fun and more excitement than you.

G.Everybody knows how important it is for students to get a good night's sleep every night.

Can zoos ever be animal-friendly?

    The topic of our last class discussion was “How can zoos provide animals with a good life?” Everyone believed it was impossible for zoos to give animals a caring environment. Our teacher suggested that visiting a modern zoo might give us a new point of view.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#} In our discussion, many people said that zoos were full of smelly cages with unhappy animals living in. Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, however, was set in an attractive, open environment. Trees and flowers had been planted around the park. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    At school, some people accused（指责）zoos of exploiting（剥削）animals for money but at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, as I see it, nothing could be further from the truth. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    Before I visited Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, I wasn't sure about the rights and wrongs of zoos. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} I feel that, although zoos can't provide the freedom of the wild, they can be animal-friendly by giving animals a safe and caring environment. As long as they do this well, to my mind they make a good contribution（贡献）to animal health. They also play an important part in educating us about wildlife. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

    On the bus back to school, we all agreed that what we liked most was the zoo's environment and we would recommend（推荐）it for next year's group.

A. It is difficult for the zoo to raise animals.

B. More and more animals enjoy their wild homes.

C. I think lots of my friends changed their minds, too.

D. Most of the money is used to improve conditions at the zoo.

E. I went to the zoo and was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

F. In my opinion, the animals, rather than seeming upset, were pleased.

G. It was difficult to say how a zoo could really make up for animals' loss of freedom.

    Important Self-Management Tips All Students Should Know

Being a student, especially in the later years of high school and the college years, can be a time when you are finally given the independence that you dreamed of. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}. If you are looking for some guidance on how best to manage yourself, then here are some of the best self-management tips all students should know.

    Sleep

    First and foremost, you need to be getting a good night's sleep as often as you can. After all, your brain needs just as much rest as any other part to operate at its full ability,  {#blank#}2{#/blank#} .

    Calendar

    Buy a calendar and make notes of every single deadline (截止日期) and class that you have. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}. One of the worst things that could happen is to complete some work but hand it in a day too late.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    Make the effort to balance your use of certain technology and social media. They are the number one reason for procrastination (拖延症) among today's student body, and training yourself to stay away when you are writing your work can be really helpful.

    Study Groups

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}, then make the most of all the different study groups that your school or college offers. There you will be able to work alongside people who are active and their attitude will encourage you into action and make you much more productive.

A. Technology Balance

B. Never Use Technology

C. so sleep is also important for the old

D. or it is not going to serve you in the best way that it can

E. But you haven't learned exactly how to manage your life

F. If you are the kind of student who finds it nearly impossible to be productive alone

G. This way you will always know where you have to be and when you have to be there

    We've all heard the saying: practice makes prefect! In other words, acquiring skills takes time and effort. But how exactly does one go about learning a complex subject such as tennis, calculus, or even how to play the violin? An age-old answer is: practice one skill at a time. A beginning pianist might rehearse scales(音阶) before chords(和弦). A young tennis player practices the forehand before the backhand. Learning researchers call this “blocking”， and because it is common and easy to schedule, blocking is dominant in schools, training programs, and other settings.

    However another strategy promises improved results. Enter “interleaving”， a largely unheard-of technique that is catching the attention of  cognitive(认知) psychologists and neuroscientists. Blocking involves practicing one skill at a time before the next (for example, “skill A” before “skill B” and so on, forming the pattern “AAABBBCCC”), while in interleaving one mixes practice on several related skills together (forming for example the pattern “ABCABCABC”).

    Over the past four decades, a small but growing body of research has found that interleaving often outperforms blocking for a variety of subjects, including sports and category learning. Yet there have been almost no studies of the technique in unplanned, real world settings-until recently. New research in schools finds that interleaving produces dramatic and long-lasting benefits for an essential skill: math. Not only does this finding have the potential to transform how math is taught, it may also change how people learn more generally.

    Researches are now working to understand why interleaving produces such impressive results. One important explanation is that it improves the brain's ability to tell apart between concepts. With blocking, once you know what solution to use, or movement to do, the hard part is over. With interleaving, each practice attempt is different from the last, so rote(死记硬背) responses don't work. Instead, your brain must continuously focus on searching for different solutions. That process can improve your ability to learn critical features of skills and concepts, which then better enables you to select and produce the correct response.

    A second explanation is that interleaving strengthens memory associations. With blocking, a single strategy，temporarily held in short-term memory, is sufficient. That's not the case with interleaving-the correct solution changes from one practice attempt to the next. As a result, your brain is continually engaged at regaining different responses and bringing them into short-term memory. Repeating that process can strengthen neural connections between different tasks and correct responses, which improves learning.

    Both of these accounts imply that increased effort during training, either to discriminate correct responses or to strengthen them, is needed when interleaving is used. This corresponds to a potential drawback of the technique, namely that the learning process often feels more gradual and difficult in the beginning. However, that added effort can have better, longer-lasting results.

    How to eat healthfully can be especially complex for working women who often have neither the desire nor the time to cook for themselves (or for anyone else).Registered dietitian(营养专家) Barbara Morrissey suggests that a few simple rules can help.

"Go for nutrient dense foods that contain a multiple of nutrients," she suggests, "For example, select whole wheat bread as a breakfast food, rather than coffee and cake. Or drink orange juice rather than orange drink, which contains only a small percentage of real juice——the rest is largely colored sugar water. You just can't compare the value of these foods, the nutrient dense ones are so superior," she emphasizes.

    Morrissey believes that variety is not only the spice of life; it's the foundation of a healthful diet. Diets which are based on one or two foods are not only virtually impossible to keep up the strength, they can be very harmful, she says, because nutrients aren't supplied in sufficient amounts or balance.

    According to Morrissey, trying to find a diet that can cure your illnesses, or make you a super woman is a fruitless search. As women, many of us are too concerned with staying thin, she says, and we believe that vitamins are some kind of magic cure to replace food.

"We need carbohydrates(碳水化合物) protein and fat—they are like the wood in the fireplace. The vitamins and minerals are like the match, the spark, for the fuel," she explains, "We need them all, but in a very different proportion. And if the fuel isn't there, the spark is useless.”