stressfreemom

My mom is about to turn 83, and she is in great shape.   At times, she is forgetful, and her biggest worry is that she will gradually lose her memory.  So I turned her on to some new activities recently, including the  brain game Street of Dreams.

It’s a simple game to play.  As cars travel by on a road, you must assign them to the appropriate house based on a category.  For example, say there are two housing lots, one labeled cars and another famous authors.  As a car races by, the word Honda pops up and you click on the lot that says cars.  A foundation appears; and, as you answer more prompts in that category correctly , the house gets built.

With every subsequent level, more categories are added, including mystery categories, which you must figure out through a process of elimination.  By Round 10, you have two identified categories and four mystery categories, making it much more difficult.  You build your own dream house between rounds.

It’s fun and challenging, so if you have fifteen minutes to spare and want to work your brain cells a bit, try Street of Dreams, or any of the other brain games out there.

http://buzz.prevention.com/community/category/stressfreemom

Prevention.com’s Split Words is a challenging brain game that will keep you (and your brain) on your toes.

As a writer, I’m usually pretty good when it comes to word games. Games like Scrabble, Boggle and Text Twist are fun and enjoyable activities that involve the ability to put letters together to form words. There are varying levels of difficulty involved in each brain game, from beginner (hardly a challenge at all) to Expert (usually quite difficult.) I usually opt for a level somewhere in the middle – hard enough to test my mettle, but not so hard that it’s more work than fun.

In the game of Split Words, you are given several parts of words from a particular category. For example, you might be given ci, ca and da from the category of insects. Or perhaps you will be given hap, pi and ness from the emotions category. But even the easiest level in Split Words makes you work your brain a bit. From there, it gets progressively more challenging while you search for all the syllables necessary to complete the words.

This is a fun activity to get your brain going before completing a tough mental task. It will help you to focus on the task at hand. Just be sure to set a timer or you may just find yourself playing this brain game instead of doing your work!