While students are settling into their new classrooms, I have the opportunity to sneak into those classrooms to do some growth mindset read-alouds and lessons. In addition, all third and fourth grade students will come into my classroom to try their hands at breaking out (or into a locked box).
Breakouts are a lot of fun, but can also be frustrating. Students are given a puzzle to solve. In order to “breakout” students must find keys to the locks and solve puzzles to help them open the combination locks. We use 3 and 4-digit locks, word locks, and a directional lock. The puzzles are tricky and really require students to work together with their group in order to solve them. Other skills we try to teach during these activities: knowing when to ask for help, listening to all the members in your group, working together as a team rather than one person being the boss, etc. It’s a great team-building activity and it’s a really awesome way to watch how students approach a problem.
As I’ve stated before, these can be pretty frustrating for some students. I’m OK with that and we do our best to make sure students become OK with that. Not every group breaks out, and in some cases, no groups break out. This is also OK. We do a debrief at the end of every session asking students to talk about things they did really well and things on which they need to work. In each session, we tie those ideas back to school and academics.
Second grade classes will hear The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes, which is an excellent introduction to the idea of learning from your mistakes and why it’s so important to take risks. We spend time discussing mistakes we’ve made and how we learned from them. As always, I encourage students to connect those ideas to school – specifically academics. It’s important for students who think that learning will always be hard to hear this message, but it’s equally as important for students who think that learning will always be easy to embrace this message. Many bright students have the idea that they’re smart because school is easy. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that idea, it causes many issues as soon as that student runs up against an idea or concept that is hard. Suddenly the very foundation of their identity as a smart kid is undermined.
The Most Magnificent Thing is the third grade read-aloud. This book follows the story of a girl who tries to make a magnificent thing, but no matter how awesome people tell her it is, it just isn’t what she imagined and she ends up very frustrated. This book teaches a few different lessons: to keep trying, take a break when you get frustrated, and to look for the good in your mistakes to help you move forward. Conversations center around different ways of dealing with frustration, that quitting is rarely your best option, and that there are often great things in your mistakes, if you’re willing to take the time to look for them.
Last but not least is my favorite of the bunch: Your Fantastic, Elastic Brain: Stretch It, Shape It. This book looks at the mechanics of how your brain works. It explains, in age-appropriate detail, the different parts of the brain and their function. It discusses the importance of practice and making mistakes. As we finish the book, students are asked to create a classroom neural network using pipe cleaners. We start with a single word: community. We start by finding a word that makes us think of community. As we brainstorm these words, students connect new words to the words on the neural network. By the time we’re done, students’ words may have connected with the idea of community or neighborhood or population or jobs or a million other things. This serves as an example of how their brain works – connecting new ideas to old ones.
