calamityfalls

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Ways to support Ukraine 🇺🇦

More than 500,000 people have already left Ukraine due to the invasion by the Russian Federation. The European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management estimates that roughly 18 million Ukrainians will be affected by the conflict in humanitarian terms, with 7 million internally displaced and 4 million seeking refuge elsewhere. To help those still in Ukraine, as well as Ukrainian refugees, we’ve compiled this list of resources.

HelpUkraineWin.org has a collection of vetted and trusted resources, charities, and organizations to help Ukraine.

Some additional ways to donate:

Vostok SOS provides immediate evacuation support.

Malteser International provides essentials for Ukrainian refugees.

Ukraine Crisis Media Center provides fundraising links and a list of tips for sharing information.

Misinformation spreads fast on social media. It is more important than ever to share accurate, verifiable news and information. Here are some resources to learn how to identify misinformation:

This video from the nonprofit WITNESS shares tips for identifying authentic sources (available in English, Spanish, Ukranian, Russian, and Arabic).

These visual verification tips, also from WITNESS, provide information on verifying images and videos (available in English and Spanish).

This interview with NPR contains tips for identifying fake TikToks.

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do you ever sabotage your own free time? like wtf is that about? i want to play this game or read or do something specific but instead i will just stare out the window or scroll mindlessly???

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ah, yes. the strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde along side a snack of apples. how fun !

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saw this on pinterest today. i’ve been going through a slight obsession with biscuits recently and i’m not really sure why. perhaps it’s due to the childhood nostalgia of begging my mum desperately for some bourbon biscuits, and when she finally gave in, the excitement that would run through my body at the sweet thought of being able to indulge in such a treat.

here’s my personal rating of biscuits (i’m bored, as you can tell):

1. Lotus Biscoff - my all time favourite biscuit. it’s the perfect delicacy to dip into a hot cup of chai/tea on those rainy days where you feel like you’ve lost all hope or motivation. never fails to make my day just slightly better.

2. Jaffa Cake- WORDS CANNOT DESCRIBE my love for these cookies. i remember when i was around 7, for my birthday, my parents bought me a metre long stick of jaffa cakes, and wow, i loved them so much. thinking about it now, i haven’t indulged in a jaffa in years, may add it to my next shopping trip ?

3. the classic Bourbon ! i used to peel the top and bottom layers, just to lick the chocolatey filling in the middle ( i feel like every kid did this). these biscuits were amazing.

4. jammy dodger ❤️. the little heart in the centre was my main cause for buying them, but they did manage to satisfy my tastebuds with their fantastic strawberry flavours. never failed to impress

well, im going to end this list here. if you’re still reading, i hope you enjoyed. i know i did, remembering all these nostalgic things from my childhood really does make me quite happy.

here’s a song that my 7 year old self religiously listened to:

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some study tips from my psychology teacher 📖

STOP Cramming

cramming is good for the short term, such as just before a test (i’m talking like an hour before), but shouldn’t be used as an effective study method. you only learn the information in the exact way you read it, so any practical application on your test won’t be easy to answer. you also will struggle with answering the same questions you studied for, but asked differently.

Spacing Effect

the spacing effect is essentially the opposite of cramming. instead of doing a 4 hour study session, break it up into groups of 30 minutes. do 30 minutes, take a nice long break, go back for 30, and repeat. that break in between gives your brain time to encode and store the information. this can be done in either one day, or over the course of a few days before the test.

Mnemonic devices are your best friend when dealing with lists of information

any sort of rhyming scheme, letter association, acronyms, etc. is proven to help you. any american can say ROY G. BIV and know exactly what they’re talking about, another example is HOMES for the great lakes. another major example is “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally”/PEMDAS for the order of operations. this helps with lists, i use it all the time in biology for stuff like the Levels of Classification or Characteristics of Living things. for AP Euro i remember “Descartes with a D” because he “Doubts and wrote Discorse on Method”.

Hierarchy Organizing for Midterms and Finals

by breaking information down into a hierarchy, you can figure out how to study all your chapters at once. these are often called “graphic organizers” and it takes the whole topic, then breaks it into subsections, then subsections of those subsections. here’s an example i found for my Memory unit

the whole unit is memory, the subtopics are sensory memory, short term, then long term. then comes the subdivisions of long term memory and so on. this is wonderful for study planning in regards to large information tests.

these are just some of the tips we talked about, and obviously they won’t work for everybody, but it’s really helped my studying process because it’s literally how the brain processes information best for long term storage and retrieval.