Persisting Enrichment for 4-7 Year Olds
As if the Habit of Mind Animations weren’t already exciting and fun enough for our elementary school students, we can now increase the fun-to-learn factor by adding this enrichment activity.
Because there is direct correlation between children’s fine motor skills, their ability to persist, and overall achievement abilities (Stoeger and Ziegler; 2013) this is the perfect enrichment activity to introduce to the classroom as we take time to explore Persisting. The best part, this printable is free!
This can be assembled in just a few steps and in as little as 10 minutes. In this tutorial we included coloring, so if you choose to do this step in your in the classroom, please plan on another 5-10 minutes to complete. The Habits of Mind Animations: Persisting episode is a child-facing 2-minute video that we have shown to students throughout the USA & Australia. We have seen it make a tremendous impression these young students in their enthusiasm and determination to persist. This free printable, is an excellent reinforcement of this Habit of Mind.
Step 1: Provide students with the free printable.
Step 2: While discussing the Persisting episode and reinforcing what it truly means to persist, allow students the time to color in the black and white pages.
Step 3: Providing students with safety scissors, allow children to cut out their own booklets, following the grey-dotted lines.
Step 4: Allow the children to sort the pictures together on their own, reinforcing order, counting, and sorting skills.
Step 5: One by one, as the child finishes compiling their booklet, have them line up at the teacher’s desk to staple together for them (there is even a soft grey line that suggest where the staple should go… really, they thought of everything!).
Step 6: Once stapled, children can return to their desk and write their own name on the cover page, working on handwriting skills and to reinforce persisting until the task is complete.
Step 7: Lastly, once all the children have their names on their completed packets, it’s time to review. Select children who would like to share their page as you go through as a class and discuss, again, the difficulties and ultimately the benefits (and rewards) of persisting; this adorable book to take home.