Today I’m grateful because I got to bake Pumpkin LOaVEs
and share them with my teaching team during a PD yesterday.
it culminated in writing a thank-you note to ourselves,
which is always an interesting reflective exercise.
I’m thinking about asking my 8th graders to do it, too,
to write a thank-you to themselves that I’ll hold on to
until they leave us in May for the high school.
I’m also grateful when students use a skill to bless someone else;
her talent as an amazing artist to draw … me.
Isn’t that just the most beautiful thankful thing?
Did you know that one of the best ways to practice gratitude
is by doing simple acts of kindness that knit us together?
Photo courtesy of Save The Children
It was so incredibly satisfying to see one of our hand-made hats
warming the tiny head of a preemie in a developing country.
Which leads me into today’s book review with a knitting theme:
“Max,” explained Izzy, “failure is part of the creative process.
We just aren’t used to it.”
YET.
Wouldn’t this be the perfect place to stop the story and ask for a time that the reader has tried something new, perhaps that they thought would be easy, and failed? What happened? What was that experience like for them? How did they feel? What do they wish they could have changed? What would they do differently if they had it to do over again?
Sometimes the big dreamer has to get the ball rolling again before she knows just what it’s going to take to realize the dream, but will Izzy get discouraged and give up after a few more failed attempts?
Or will her growth mindset kick in and help her find an even better way for “turning a sweater full of mistakes into something fabulous” even as she’s intentionally knitting kindness for some furry friends along the way?
NOTE: This tale takes me back to our third-grade knitting days because some of their initial tries were just awful. Until they weren’t anymore because we always looked for ways to praise the process rather than the product. That was a beautiful season in my journey and I’ll be forever grateful to our volunteers for their commitment to teaching our students how to knit kindness, one stitch of love at a time.
Photo courtesy of Save The Children
Happy Thanks and Giving, dear reader.
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