Perseverance Resources

As you plan for this month's lesson, the following resources and ideas might be helpful.

Click here for a recording of the meeting. Click here to view the slides in Powerpoint formatting and here for slides in a PDF as you watch the recording.

Click here for this month's family newsletter in English and here for the newsletter in Spanish.

Click here for the link to the 2016-17 Classroom Champions Planning Manual to find even more resources on Perseverance!

This month's video lesson may contain several big points:

1. What Perseverance embodies:
1. Bounce back stronger after failure
2. Welcome challenges, and “fail forward”
3. Remain positive when faced with adversity
4. Develop a "no quit" spirit while pursuing goals
2. Different ways to demonstrate Perseverance
3. Exploring Perseverance:
1. Vocabulary
2. People
3. Failure
4. Welcoming Struggle
4. A challenge to the students that may include:
1. Reflect on a time when they gave up, and what might have happened if they had used perseverance.
2. Think of a time when they overcame a challenge. Describe that to a classmate, and to the mentor.
3. Make a mantra to use for encouraging yourself and others when you need to persevere.

You may want to prepare for watching the video lesson by:

1. Planning for vocabulary development as needed
2. Preparing a Frayer model to make Fair Play more concrete by creating examples and non-examples of Perseverance. Click here to view an example of a Frayer Model.

There will be lots of information that will be helpful in planning this topic below. Please pick and choose what works best for you and your students. Texts will be at the bottom of this blog entry.

Vocabulary Development

Perseverance is a new word for many bigs and littles. Kate Pereira, Education Coordinator for Canada, offered an excellent example of how to teach perseverance. After introducing the word she took her students ice skating as a way to teach the meaning of perseverance through experience.

Perseverance Demonstrated in Videos:

1. To explore examples of perseverance by viewing Steve’s Ted Talk where he explains how he perseveres through his doubts to achieve his goal.
2. This year for the first time the Rio Olympics 2016 game there will be the Refugee Olympics Team. These refugees have no home, no team, no flag, no national anthem. Check this link to learn more.
3. Taco Bell offers the Live Mas scholarship, an opportunity to help students who want to persevere through their dreams. Click here to see Justin’s story about following and working towards his dream of becoming a writer and how the Liva Mas scholarship helped Justin and others like him.

Failure and Welcoming Struggle:

1. A blog post from a math teacher who utilized this bulletin board in her class to help students use language to use positive framing when speaking about their ability.
2. Common Sense Media- Self Control: Having self-control (some prefer the term "self-regulation") is about appropriately managing your thoughts, feelings, and impulses. It starts with being consistently mindful of yourself and others and working toward a high emotional intelligence. So much of the way we use technology today challenges the idea of restraint, from tweeting in anger to posting for "likes."
3. Kids might find it useful to collect catchphrases, or to make their own mantras to overcome doubting self talk.

Other great Perseverance Resources:

1. Link to a Syrian Teenager Who Pushed Sinking Boat To The Coast Will Compete In The Olympics
2. Here is a way to inspire students to push through the challenges of the writing process. Write the World offers competitions encouraging students to dig deeper into the writing process with the understanding that a first draft is never perfect, they allow students to have the chance to receive peer and expert feedback before submitting their final piece.
3. Learning a second language can be celebrated as well. An article about the benefits of knowing more than one language as a student for context.

4. Grit Curriculum Lesson: The Perseverance Walk- Students are asked to interview people in their own lives about a time when they had to battle through something to reach a goal. The curriculum includes a tip sheet for how to interview and examples of a finished product.

Lesson Ideas:

1. Allow students to create a list of excuses that they can toss into the trash or in the shredder.
2. Practice perseverance with a STEM inspired teamwork challenge. Each student will need a toilet paper tube, and the class will need a single marble. Challenge the students to get the marble from one end of the classroom to the other, without it stopping, or hitting the floor. Make the task more challenging by adding obstacles and requiring the marble to go over, under, or around objects. During the challenge you may stop to discuss strategies that work well and how students react when they don’t reach the goal.
3. Have a quick minute? Get students excited, working together, and ready to refocus on curriculum by playing some ‘Minute to Win It’ games throughout the day. These games are an awesome opportunity to get silly, stick with something challenging, and reinforce good sportsmanship principles!
4. Challenge your students to spend this month learning that new skill. You may offer time in class for them to research the tools and background knowledge they will need or help them pair up with an expert mentor (maybe a classmate, older student, or family member) who can support them. Have them keep a journal as they undertake this process and document their successes, failures, and obstacles. Students can showcase their awesome new skills!
5. Flex your STEM muscles and try something new - learn basic coding and create your story, game, or animation for your friends and classmates to watch and play. We can guarantee it won’t be easy, and might not work the first time, but when it does, it will be so worth it!

Book Resources: Be sure to check the Planning Manual for more examples!

1. Pop! The Invention of Bubble Gum- Bubble-blowing kids everywhere will be delighted with Megan McCarthy's entertaining pictures and engaging fun facts as they learn the history behind the pink perfection of Dubble Bubble.
2. Wilma Unlimited- Before Wilma was five years old, polio had paralyzed her left leg. Everyone said she would never walk again. But Wilma refused to believe it. Not only would she walk again, she vowed, she'd run. And she did run--all the way to the Olympics, where she became the first American woman to earn three gold medals in a single olympiad.
3. Very Good Lives offers J.K. Rowling’s words of wisdom for anyone at a turning point in life, asking the profound and provocative questions: How can we embrace failure? And how can we use our imagination to better both ourselves and others?

4. 11 Experiments That Failed- Is it possible to eat snowballs doused in ketchup—and nothing else—all winter? Can a washing machine wash dishes? By reading the step-by-step instructions, kids can discover the answers to such all-important questions along with the book's curious narrator.

A few interesting resources for you as a learner:

1. Article about the misconceptions about Growth Mindset.
2. Here is an article to a helpful list of how to incorporate Growth Mindset into your classroom environment.
3. Inspired by the popular mindset idea that hard work and effort can lead to success, Mindsets in the Classroom provides educators with ideas for building a growth mindset school culture, wherein students are challenged to change their thinking about their abilities and potential. With the book's step-by-step guidance on adopting a differentiated, responsive instruction model, teachers can immediately use growth mindset culture in their classrooms.
4. In How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues for a very different understanding of what makes a successful child. Drawing on groundbreaking research in neuroscience, economics, and psychology, Tough shows that the qualities that matter most have less to do with IQ and more to do with character: skills like grit, curiosity, conscientiousness, and optimism.