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.

Community Lesson - Nov/Dec

Community Lesson - Nov/Dec

Community is a great topic for our school - we even include it in our school name: GH Dawe Community School! At our school, we teach about  7 Strengths for Success.  Our school’s character strength of the month is HOPE, which fits well with the Classroom Champions theme.

Here is a snippet from GH Dawe’s HOPE lesson for the month of December:

Sadly, bad things happen in our world. Some times they are big tragedies that affect cities or even countries (earthquakes, floods, etc), and sometimes they affect only you, like a bad hair day or your friend moving away. But everyone has bad days. Even things that are little problems may seem huge at the time and can really get you down.

That’s why we need to have hope. Successful people don’t let these bad situations ruin their hopeful attitude.

How do you know if you have hope?

• I can create a good future for myself.
• I focus on the good things in my life.
• I think everything will be okay.

What if you don’t have hope? Can I learn to be hopeful? YES!  You can train your brain to have hope.

After watching the videos shared with us by Arianne Jones, we brainstormed all the communities of which we are a part. Here is a picture of our mind map:

Arianne inspired us to do something to have a positive impact or give back to our community, so we each set a goal of one thing we would focus on before the end of December. When we return from Christmas break, we will reflect on how we did, how it made us feel to give back, and how we can continue to have a positive impact beyond the holiday season. Here are some pictures of our ideas:

On that note, an opportunity crossed my desk to begin a new recycling campaign at our school. Our school already recycles paper, bottles/cans/juice boxes, batteries, and broken or used up plastic pens/highlighters/mechanical pencils.  With the help of Staples (office supply store), our class is going to manage a program for recycling foil wrappers from fruit snacks and granola bars. We hope this will have a big impact on our school community and the environment by reducing our trash.

We look forward to keeping more trash out of our landfill and keeping our community clean and green!

November- Community

Our November went by quick! We had our live visit with @Meryl Davis and @Charlieawhite on Oct 31st.  The students were so excited to talk to them and asked great questions.  We had a school board member and news reporter come to the classroom for the event. +Classroom Champions got fantastic recognition for the work that they are doing with students.

We received our "swag" about two weeks ago.  Some of my students have already worn their shirts three or four times to school. They are so proud of their shirts.  We loved all the swag.

Our community project has been very successful so far. We made a list of groups that might need extra help or support during the winter months.  The student discussed who we could help and how we could help them.  We then have some very thoughtful groups discussions on who we should help.  The kids voted and although it was very close, our local Animal shelter was the winner!  (Maybe because we know how much @Charlieawhite Loves his puppies!

After we selected the animal shelter we set our goal.... $500 !!  It is a lofty goal, but we discussed how we could achieve it.  The students suggested many ideas, but our school does not allow big fundraiser projects, so we had to keep it simple.   We decided to do a bottle/can drive as well as collect pennies/change.   The students also wanted to volunteer to do "Chores" or extra work to earn money to donate. During the month of November the kids raised $300!  I am so proud of them.  This was all from bottles/cans and spare change, along with extra chore money!   We now have ONE week to earn the remaining $200-- but I think the students are up for the challenge. 

When we make our goal, we get to take a field trip to the shelter (Where they are going to teach the students about responsible pet ownership) to donate the money!   The kids are proud of their work and I can not wait to surprise the shelter with their amazing donation!!

Pictures of field trip --- to come! 

Community

We had a great time helping out our community! We started our discussion by watching the mentor video Lex posted. Then we discussed ways we could help our families, our school community, and our city. We have three Classroom Champions teachers at our school and we decided to work together to host a food drive.
Each class contributed. The first grade class made the posters to encourage donations and the two fifth grade classrooms counted the number of donated cans in the classrooms each day. We had a school competition to encourage donations and we able to collect over 1,000 food items. It was a great success and my students were proud to help their community!

The rest of our month has been filled with excitement. We been preparing for the holidays and working hard in class, so my students were really excited to learn we would have a live chat with Lex! To make it even better, we received our Classroom Champions shirts just the day before. They were excited to wear their new shirts and talk with our mentor.

The students were proud to share our success with the food drive! They also learned more about Lex's training and the advice he had for our holiday break.

The months of November and December have been incredibly busy- but very productive. My students have learned a lot about their role in helping the community and have gotten great advice from our mentor. I'm really excited to continue our lessons in January!
        

It has been an exciting month for my Classroom Champions. We started by supporting our school's canned food drive. We talked about the need in our community for families who may not have enough food to eat during the holidays. Our part of the project was to make signs to hang up around campus to encourage the other students to bring in as many cans as possible.

The students were really excited to be a part of this project and our school ended up donating quite a bit of food to Second Harvest Food Bank. The classes that brought in the most food got to have a free dress day (the students usually wear uniforms).
The other exciting thing this month was video chatting with our awesome mentor Lex Gillette. My students enjoyed asking him questions about participating in the Olympics, training, everyday life, etc. He also told the students a great story about a time when he wanted to give up but kept on persevering. They really consider Lex to be their friend, they are benefitting so much from his mentorship. They also loved the shirts, stickers, pencils and folders from Classroom Champions and the Lex poster is now hanging proudly in our room.
 

JDH in our Community!

Community in Grade 6 & 7 

Where oh where did November go? I still cannot believe it is over and we are rushing closer and closer to Christmas Break! 

November brought many exciting things to our Grade 6 and 7 classes, including our first live chat with our mentor Kieran Block! 

Community is a big part of our classroom all year round, so coming up with ideas of how we can help our school and local community seemed like easy work for our kids! 

As part of Canada's 150th Birthday Celebration RBC has launched a campaign called #Make150Count. People tweet at RBC with this hashtags for ideas of how they could make $150 count in their community. Both classes came up with pitches for RBC and tweeted them out in early November. While we did not hear back from RBC it really got the students heads in the game for what's to come. We had so many lovely ideas from giving to the food bank, to buy and splitting wood for someone in need of heat this winter, to donating warm clothing to those who cannot afford it. 

During November we also celebrated the Week of Kindness where we celebrated all of the staff members in our fantastic school. Each student made a thank you card for a staff member and hand delivered it with a hug. It is easy to forget how important the people we see every day are to us! 

This past Monday we had our first live chat with Kieran! The kids were so excited to hear more about his life and to share information about us. We cannot wait to share more of what we are doing with Kieran as the year carries on. Including the essays and letter the grade 7's are writing about why Classroom Champions is such a valuable program! 

Finally, as we move into December the grade 6 and 7's are busy planning what we are going to do for our community before our break. We have plans to bake 150 cookies to hand deliver to the Long Term Care home just before Christmas! The grade 6's are also working hard every day at learning Silent Night on the Ukulele as well as the words to the song in both English and Arabic as a way to welcome our new classmates and their family members to our school community! Look forward to that video before Christmas - if I can keep my emotions in check long enough to video tape it!

 

November Update on Community

November Update on Community

November is already over! I hardly noticed because we were working so hard in Grade 5 on our Helping Our Community project! After we watched Jesse's video we wanted to learn a little bit more about what was special about our community, so we used the writing process to create paragraphs titled My Community. We learned all about the different things our peers love to do in our community like, going to concerts (yes we do have concerts all the way up here, usually by Inuit bands like Twin Flames, Jaji, and The Jerry Cans), playing hockey at the arena, playing outside, and going to the restaurant. We also wrote about the other things that are in our community like the nursing station, houses, the municipal building, and the Co-op. 

After we talked about what our community had we started to talk about what community members might need. We wanted to make sure that we did a service project that would be helpful to our community; some ideas just wouldn't work up here! We finally settled on a food drive. Since food is so expensive in Northern Canada, some families go without food, or with very little. 

We started our project by brain storming our Goal, and how to get the word out. 

After we decided on a goal we created a Goal tracker to have a visual of how close we were.

Our next step was to create posters, so everyone got a lesson in making posters in Word. 

Our next steps will be to collect the food and then bring it to the DYP for distribution! 

In the mean time we started another smaller community project. We will be going to the grade 3/4 class to teach them straw weaving. The kids have been practising all week to make sure they are experts when they start teaching!

We are loving community, and counting down the days till Christmas now!