The first of the growth mindset stances that we covered is resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back and recover from setbacks and failures. When you have trouble, you bounce back and try again. Imagine a ball floating in a pool. No matter how far down you push it, it will always come back to the surface. This is resilience. It is what allows us to persist, and without it learning something new is next to impossible.
Next we will learn how to build our resistance, including doing things that bring us joy, getting plenty of sleep, eating a balanced diet, staying active and practicing gratitude. For other ways to help kids build resilience, check out: In their book, A Mindset for Learning, Mraz and Hertz describe what they refer to as a constellation of stances, or habits of mind, that make up a growth mindset. They are:
In wellness, we explored kindness and caring for others by reading How Full is Your Bucket? For Kids. We learned how everyone has an "invisible bucket." When our bucket is full, we feel great. When our bucket is empty, we feel awful. We learned how our actions can make us bucket fillers or bucket dippers and how being kind, being a bucket filler, fills our bucket, too; that the way we treat others can make them happy and can change how good we feel about ourselves.
We will continue to brainstorm ways to be bucket fillers at school and home. For more information, check out:
According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, our needs can be organized into five tiers. Our base needs - food, water and shelter - form the base, followed by safety, belonging and love, and so on. The needs lower in the pyramid must be satisfied before individuals can attend to the needs higher up, including students being available for learning.
Two takeaways:
As a Lego fan, I frequently use them with working with students. I have been meaning to share this video with some students for awhile and opted to post it to here. In this stop-motion video, a boy uses Lego bricks to build a model of the Titanic. Pretty cool, right!?!
I did a bit of googling and was able to learn about this builder and his work. Fifteen-year-old Icelandic Karl Brynjar is on the autism spectrum and developed a passion for learning about the Titanic at a young age. When he turned 10, he decided to combined his passion for the Titanic with his other love: Lego. Karl worked on the model over an 11-month span, with 700 hours of build time and using 56,000 Lego bricks. Karl's accomplishment has gone viral online. He hosted a Ted Talk to explain how a boy with autism overcame obstacles to complete his dream project and he is writing a book, My Autistic X Factor. For more information about Karl, check out the links below. I hope this inspires your child to build some amazing Lego creations! In wellness, students are learning about a "growth mindset" and how it differs from a "fixed mindset." With a growth mindset, you believe that your traits, habits, personality, skills are growing and changing. With a fixed mindset, on the other hand, you believe all of these are fixed and immovable. Having a growth mindset is important for learning. Check out these resources:
I LOVE to hike! From late spring to late fall, you can often find me out on a local trail. And pre-Covid I offered an after school hiking club for Moretown and Fayston students. There are lots of reasons to take your kids on more hiking trips. Some benefits of hiking with kids include:
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Jason StevensonSchool Counselor - Avid Hiker - Reader - Lego Enthusiast Archives
January 2024
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