Muscles of the Mind - Series by Royal Fireworks Press

By Marco Meirovitz with Paul I. Jacobs and Stuart Dods

This set of books aims to build and increase thinking skills through a structured and sophisticated program of games and entertaining activities, and shows how to apply thses skills to a wide range of life situations.  It can be used every year from pre-school through adulthood with positive results.

• Deductive Logic (Using Information): How to put together separate but related facts, eliminate irrelevant information, and reach a valid conclusion.
• Inductive Logic (Discovering Rules): How to discover rules by observing what is similar and different among many events.
• Memory: How to remember what has been learned and what one wishes to remember.
• Creative Thinking: How to develop new and different ideas.
• Planning (Strategy): How to make plans, anticipate events, and organize efficiently to reach broad goals and to accomplish daily tasks.
• Psychomotor Activity: How to control your body movements and coordinate them with your thinking.
• Visualization: How to see in space, to imagine changes in spatial relations, to transfer images from two dimensions to three dimensions, and to observe carefully.
• Communication: How to transmit a clearly understood message, and how to avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
• Problem Solving (Transfer and Application) How to create new ideas through critical thinking and logic and to make appropriate decisions to solve problems of everyday life.

Goals of the Muscles of the Mind Program

• To develop and strengthen habits of efficient, systematic and productive thinking.
• To stimulate and develop natural intellectual potential and to increase self-confidence in the exercise of that potential.
• To promote better teaching and learning, making life easier for students, parents, and teachers.
• To help people adjust more easily to technological changes and to prepare them to deal more easily with school, home, work, and life situations.

Pedagogic Features

• All the games, puzzles, and other activities are designed to be fun so that learners are well-motivated.
• The program helps develop and practice the major thinking skills we use in our daily lives.
• Each activity is present at several levels so students can find greater challenges as their abilities develop.
• The program provides appropriate materials for visual, abstract, tactile, and verbal learners.
• By practicing each major skill in different games and activities, and from different angles, students come to understand better the thinking processes and their uses in new situations.
• Students learn how to transfer and apply principles and thinking processes from the games to everyday life problems.
• Students develop effective thinking habits that become as automatic as riding a bicycle or driving a car.
• Teaching and learning take place through activity, discovery, and discussion. Students learn through experience and mistakes—their own and their peers’.
• Students need no specific prior knowledge to use the program.
• The program is interdisciplinary, applicable to all school, professional and vocational subjects.

 The Program consists of four books and an activity kit.