Perseverance - This is How We Do it

I love perseverance! In fact my students know my favourite saying is,

 "What happens when we do hard things? We get smarter!" 

At the beginning of the year they used to complain that work was "too hard," but they slowly realized that if they tried their best, then the work was just right. They also know that if they think it is too hard, they probably just need a refresher on how to do it, or they need a little help. No one ever said you had to persevere without help!

This month the students and I have really dug into perseverance. This is a topic that really hits close to home for me because I teach very far away from my family and fiancé. Sometimes it can be really hard to imagine getting through two months without seeing them at all. I used this to talk to my students about what perseverance can look like. We talked about what perseverance meant, and different ways we each persevered in our classroom. We wrote out examples, and non-examples of perseverance.

 When we watched Jesse's video he told us to look back at our goals and see how far we had come. We realized that this was difficult for us because many of the students didn't really believe that they could reach the goals they had written down. They were so far in the future that they could not combine it with their everyday reality. So we decided we would try again to look at Goals in a new way. We created a classroom goal.

Since we were working on multiplication we decided to make our goal around that. I found a multiplication quiz online and we made it our goal to have everyone finish it in under 2 minutes. I made a chart so that we could track our progress, and we set to work.

This goal is definitely taking some perseverance! The first day we had students finishing in between 3 and 12 minutes. We time ourselves every day and now we have two people who can do it in under 2 minutes and everyone can do it in under 5. Even though January is almost over we will not be stopping! I am so looking forward to the day that each of them finish in under 2 minutes! I wish you could see the proud look on their faces when they show me that they finished 20 seconds faster than yesterday. It is making me choke up while I write this!

Math has not been the only place that we have been persevering. Our school is also having a science fair, and even though we are the youngest class involved my kids are hard at work trying to go to regionals! Our question is "How should we wash our hands?"Check out these amazing scientists!

As you can see, the hand washer is blindfolded so that they cannot try to scrub off the paint they see. Since we can't see germs we used this method to test our hypothesis.

My students show perseverance every single day, some just by showing up to school. They have a lot of challenges to overcome, but they are up to it. Cannot wait to start friendship and to tell you the results of our science fair!

All the best! GR 5 E!