Wednesday, April 12, 2017

How Will You Finish Strong?

The spring brings all kinds of life and liveliness into every part of our personal lives and our classrooms. Benefits of spring are warmer weather, longer days, and the beauty of everything in bloom. It is also the last leg of the race in a school year. The time when we are seeing the fruits of the work we have invested in our students and the realities that our hard work may not have yielded the growth in some of our students we had worked for, hoped for and lost sleep over.

It is hard not to focus in our reflections on our professional practice where things haven't quite turned out how we had pictured. We can mourn for the hope of where we thought we would be, but we can't camp out there. This is where we must focus on the growth, what we have accomplished, the progress. It is in this that we put into practice the growth mindset. It is where we remember last August when we came together as a staff and started our 2016-17 year talking about how having a growth mindset and how that allows us to move forward... even in our moments of disappointment or mistakes... we "fail forward."

As we contemplate and reflect, how can we finish this year confidently and positively? How can we finish strong?

As this week's blog post topic was swirling around in my head, I realized this belief that "finishing strong" is critical had everything to do with maintaining a healthy campus culture. So I called on our resident health expert, Nurse Amanda Wiggans. With calendar in hand, we took the idea of the from the 21 Day Challenge in January (http://srelonghornlearning.blogspot.com/2017/02/happiness-mindfulness-and-classroom.html), and turned to our best resources... Google and Pinterest. What Amanda determined is that there were exactly 30 days left with students starting April 17th. What she also discovered is that there are a lot of resources to support a 30 Day Positivity Challenge. Wheels began turning... Positive Thinking + Positive Talk= Healthy Culture/Staff....

AND... drum roll please, when we have a Healthy Culture/Staff WE ARE GUARANTEED to FINISH STRONG!

The great thing is no one has to go and come up with ideas to participate in the 30 Day Positivity Challenge. We are providing the ideas for you (thanks to Nurse Amanda Wiggans!).

Here are 30 Suggestions for each of the next 30 School Days:


Some alternates in case you might want a substitute for one of the days:
  • Write a list of reasons why you love someone (and give it to them)
  • Leave a funny note in a library book to make someone smile.
  • Compliment a stranger.
  • Tell 3 people you admire something about them.
Additionally, if you love memes, why not share via social media a quote from a fictional teacher or mentor? Fun and Funny... How can you beat that for positivity???

Here is a list of fun fictional quotes:

Feel free to share via Social Media what you are doing each day or a meme you have created from the quotes as your part in participating in the positivity challenge. Tag your posts with #SREisAwesome #FinishStrong #30DayChallenge

If you have more ideas that you would like to share or simply want to leave your thoughts regarding the 30 Day Positivity Challenge... please comment below!

(Special thanks to Beverly and Amanda W. for providing the idea and resources for this week's post!)

1 comment:

  1. Today was a great, positive day in 4th grade. The entire team helped get math stations together for STAAR review, we ordered pizza, ate cake and laughed. All working together in one room, enjoying each other as friends and coworkers was awesome! We got so much accomplished and appreciated each other's ideas and work.

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