How will hide from a witch? Gritch the Witch wants to make piggie pie, but Gritch does not have all of the ingredients. Gritch travels to a farm to gather her ingredients, but the pigs see her coming. The pigs disguise themselves as different animals to hide from the witch. The book provides many opportunities to do activities with your students. I would have my students disguise a pig and write a story about the pig and its disguise.
Reading Level: Lexile 490L
Grades K-3
Finally, the explanation for why Americans aren’t saving enough: It’s not sexy. Now, spending: that’s sexy.
That’s one of the findings in Thinking Money: The Psychology Behind Our Best and Worst Financial Decisions, airing on public television stations beginning Thursday, Oct. 16; check local listings. It’s produced in association with the FINRA Investor Education Foundation (FINRA is the largest independent securities regulator in the U.S.).
In truth, the show is really about behavioral economics, but that’s not very sexy either.
So the program serves up key principles by interviewing experts from the likes of Princeton, Stanford and Yale — as well as what we call in the journalism trade “real people” — to explain why our brains keep us from doing the right thing with our money and how to outsmart them. For instance, you’ll learn how to combat “the IKEA effect,” which makes you put more value on products you helped create than ones you don’t.
If this all still sounds a little wonky, it’s worth noting that the program has some pretty funny and weird experiments.
For instance, someone gets wine coursed through a vein while in an fMRI (a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine that measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow) to see how the brain reacts when it thinks the person is drinking a $90 bottle of pinot noir versus a $10 bottle. In another, the jokey host — comedian/actor Dave Coyne — wears Virtual Reality goggles to see what he’d look like “old.”
As Thinking Money’s producer and writer John Greco told me, the show offers ways “to fight your instinct to spend money now.”
Four lessons from the show:
The jams, the show explains, are an excellent proxy for all those investment choices employees often have to pick through when deciding where to put their 401(k) money. As it turns out, the more 401(k) choices people have, the less likely they are to invest in the plan. “Iyengar found that so many people are so confused by their 401(k) choices that they invest in what they can understand, like money market funds. But those barely keep up with inflation,” said Greco.
Thinking Money describes the clever, free website, Stickk.com, where users sign up for “commitment contracts” to force them to reach their goal. (The genesis of the site came from Yale economists.) When setting your goal and a date, you can also tell Stikk which organization you detest that should receive money charged to your credit card if you fail.
On the show, grad student Graham Brown says he took out a commitment contract to force himself to make lunch three days a week and put the money he’d saved toward a road trip with a buddy. It worked.
How to avoid confirmation bias? Daylain Cain, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale University, advises in the show that when you’re about to make an investment purchase, be a devil’s advocate and ask yourself: What could go wrong?
“Any of us can do that, we just have to be motivated,” said Greco.
One secret of con artists, says Shadel: They look for people who’ve just lost a lot of money because those people are angry and upset. As a result, they aren’t thinking clearly.
“That makes them more susceptible to the con man’s pitch,” said Greco.
You can find other useful tips on saving, investing, controlling debt and protecting your future at FINRA’s Saveandinvest.org site.
After watching Thinking Money, maybe you’ll feel a nudge to trim back spending and save more for your impending retirement.
Greco told me that, since working on the show, that’s exactly what he’s done. “I work primarily at home and used to think nothing about buying lunch out. Now I find myself making lunch a lot more.”
He added: “It’s never too late to change spending habits that can hurt you.”
I hadn't realized this was The Lindora Clinic diet when I first read it. My Mother was a follower of The Lindora Plan for many years off and on, and watching her diet over the years I learned a lot about this program. I actually had read an earlier version of this book. I did not care for the format of this book, it was difficult to put the information together.
The diet did work, she always quickly dropped the weight, but she found it impossible to stick to long term and gained the weight back. This is not a diet I would personally follow.
This new updated version is supposed to be easier to use and filled with more relevant information. It does have more, medical note boxes, updated good/bad food lists, plus information available to smart phone users using codes. I wish all this updated information and had been better organized, it felt jumbled and was difficult to locate information I wanted. I found myself jumping all over trying to "put it together." If I were to try to follow this program I would go back to one of the older copies for a quick easy read with clear direction.
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