Additional Perseverance Activities
Newsworthy Perseverance Teachers create a classroom bulletin board where, throughout the year, the class posts newspaper, magazine, or online articles about people who have experienced failure and then persevered. Ask students to reflect and share with the class what they learned from the story. Ask students to answer these questions:
Sharing Stories of Perseverance With Younger Students Students work in groups of two or three to create a poem, skit, children’s story, or video that demonstrates a character who (a) sets a goal, (b) struggles, (c) fails, and (d) achieves the goal. Depending on the grade level of the students, teachers can expand the activity by requiring character development, storyboards, introductions, paragraph development, figurative language, or other challenging tasks. As a culminating activity, teachers can invite a younger class to buddy up with their students where the older students share the project and teach the younger students what it means to persevere. Perseverance Skits The teacher creates a variety of situation cards and puts them in a bucket. Students work in pairs. The student pairs draw a situation card from the bucket. Students role play the situation and act out how they might encounter obstacles and persevere. Possible scenarios:
Writing a Report on Perseverance Teachers ask students to choose a famous person who has dealt with obstacles and triumphed. During the report, students will expand on the perseverance journey of the individual and lessons learned from the experience. Examples of 30 possible choices Zootopia – Try Everything! Zootopia is a melting pot where animals from every environment live together—a place where no matter what you are, you can be anything. But when rookie officer, Judy Hopps, becomes the first bunny on the police force she realizes it isn’t easy. Determined to accomplish her goals, Judy jumps at the opportunity to solve a mystery at hand. She deals with multiple setbacks and challenges. The film’s main song, Try Everything (video) by Shakira, has a strong message of tenacity and is a great song to play in the classroom. Suggested activities for the movie Zootopia
Resource: I Don't Quit - Great clip of Judy's perseverance Celebrations of Personal Success We don’t always take the time to reflect and celebrate individual successes, but if we want to have a classroom that values perseverance, then we need to have perseverance celebrations. The teacher creates a large ladder or bulletin board where students can write challenges they accomplished either inside or outside the classroom and place it on the top of the ladder or on the board. Teachers can have die cut stars premade so that students just write their name and the achievement on the front side. This should be a year long activity for the classroom. |