By Angela DiTerlizzi, illustrated by Lorena Alvarez
“By framing low grades or mistakes as an opportunity to improve, instead of a final result, we provide ourselves and others with the confidence to continue learning — “yet” provides a path to the future.” -Carol Dweck
I am a big fan of the Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck. Watch her talk about the “Power of Yet” here:
The Magical Yet, introduces children to the growth mindset. Imagine what our lives would be like if we only saw failures and mistakes as just a “not yet”.
In this book, each child has their own magical Yet. What a lovely idea – what if we all had our own little yets?
This little boy tries and fails and tries again…and then…
The little girl who failed at riding her bike and wanted to quit… tried again. Now she designs bikes. What if she gave up? She would have never designed this beautiful bike!
After the story, we talked about the things we cannot do yet. Miss Library is still trying to do a headstand in yoga. I have not managed it YET! Each child held our ‘magic yet ball” and talked about their yets. What is your yet?
So many children really want to learn to ride a bike. We watched this video of this little boy, who falls off of his bike, but then dances about it! What if we all danced about our failures?
Video here:
The younger children really liked this Sesame Street video ,”Power of Yet”:
Maker Space worked with a “Power of Yet” challenge. How do you stack balls? Haha – they failed a lot until they figured out a solution.
Each child took home a necklace as a reminder:
For a necklace, print and cutout:
For my after school classes we continued with the theme of Yet. We did a stem project (willing to fail), and imagined what our own personal yet might look like:
You try something, it doesn’t work, and maybe people even criticize you. In a fixed mindset, you say, ‘I tried this, it’s over.’ In a growth mindset, you look for what you’ve learned.
Let’s all keep on learning!
Beatrix is trying to say he believes in the POWER OF YET (and Berto agrees):
For more Growth Mindset ideas go here:
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