Fall Greetings from Ms. Shari!
Our Weekly Word: Determination
Continuing with our Starting Strong theme, this week we are focusing our attention on how important it is to be determined when learning something new or staying the course... especially when “the going gets tough.”
It’s important to talk with children about how we all have to learn in our own ways and guess what? Mom and Dad didn’t always know how to do all the things they now know how to do! Share an example of something that was hard for you to learn and what you did to finally master it. Recognize that when we first try something new, it’s going to feel weird and we probably won’t be that good at it…..YET. But with:
DETERMINATION
Practice...practice...practice along with
Asking for AND accepting help, we can all learn to do new things, no matter how old we are.
Our 3rd and 4th graders are learning how our brain is always changing and growing.
If we could look inside our brain to see what is happening, we would see different parts of our brain firing messages to other parts of our brain making pathways. The pathways connect specific parts of our brain needed to work together to accomplish something. These connected pathways make up a network.
When we practice and make a mistake, we adjust what we are doing which changes the connections in the network building different pathways. We get better and better the more we try and after lots of practice, the networks in our brain become stronger. Sometimes we get so good at something that we don’t even need to consciously think about what we are doing! Our networks become so strong, the energy needed to think about how to do something becomes minimal allowing us to now focus that energy on advanced, more complicated skills.
If we give up after we make a mistake, we will never build the pathways in our brains to experience success. However, with determination, we recognize we are ALL going to make mistakes. We plan for the mistakes. We plan to examine what we did wrong so we can take a different route, literally, in our brain. Our brain is AMAZING!
Mistakes are proof you’re trying and necessary to help grow your brain.