Planning: Designing your Future

These resources are intended to help you build your students' context around college life, and how the decisions they make today affect their opportunities in the future. If you find these helpful, thank Anjoli! She did an amazing job finding these for everyone!

Big ideas in this blog:

• What does it mean to be a college student?
• What does it mean to be a college athlete?
• Exploring how the decisions we make now affect our future. 

Vocab development:

This may or may not be the first time your students are discussing the world of college. Below are some vocabulary words to consider when introducing the topic and this link will guide you to The Vocabulary of College - Vocabulary List generated by vocabulary.com.

You may notice the intermingling of the words school, college and university and how they all can have the same meaning. Here is a brief article discussing the differences and a short charming video from the NY Times with a teacher introducing college to first graders.

What does it mean to be a college student?

• Ready to introduce college to your students, here is a blog shared by a 3rd grade teacher with 4 great tips of ways to introduce college to your classroom.
• Here is a brief article about what it means to be a first generation college student.
• Want to explore college ranking’s with your students check out this recent article from NPR.
• Start a discussion about the idea college with this short video of college students, with differing opinions, explaining what they believe it means to be a college  student vs a short video of high school students sharing their beliefs of what college and career readiness means to them. 
• Explore the campus of University of Pennsylvania to glimpse into the world of your student athlete mentor with these links:
• A 6 minute video from College Life Presents: UPENN giving history of the campus and an idea of what daily life looks like for UPENN students. This video also shouts out UPENN athletics! (Please watch ahead of time, at about 4min in begins to discuss more adult topics)
• Discover the locations your student athlete mentor navigate with this interactive campus map! Hint: When clicking the Discover Penn and Public Art options you can find out some neat spots on campus!

What does it mean to be a college student athlete?

• Link to an article discussing the differences of being a college student athlete vs being a college student.
• A glimpse into a day in the life of a student athlete as shared by USC Track & Field high jumper Herb Dew takes us through a day in his life.
• An article recommended for older students about The Life of a Student Athlete from Huffington Post.

College is not the only option:

• There are several other options to discover besides going to college. This article from Forbes suggests some great alternatives.   
• For your older students this is an article that can put into context the value of vocational training for the workforce. Note: There is a lot of new vocabulary worth exploring with your students before digging into the article. 
• A short and informative read from the Harvard Gazette about the rising value and importance of vocational training in the states, citing that “only three in 10 young people earn a bachelor’s degree by their mid-20s.”

Decisions today affect tomorrow:

• We don’t always have to wait till we are adults to think big! Here is a link to a TED talk discussing what adults can learn from kids.
• In the next few months you will be exploring topics like goal setting and perseverance and here is a short video of a student who set his goal to be a writer and persevered through several challenges of affording college until he was awarded a scholarship to pursue his goals.
• Planning for the future can be intimidating, so have fun and enjoy activities like training like an astronaut or have students practice writing a job description for their dream job.
• Need a boost, enjoy a pep talk from Kid President and explore what you and your students can do to make the world awesome for the today and tomorrow!

Planning resources: Goal Setting

Goal Setting

Family newsletter in English and Spanish.

This month's video lesson may contain several big points:

1. The definition of a goal
2. Why goal setting skills are important
3. The types of goals (long or short term, personal or academic, etc.)
4. How the mentor set goals in his or her own life
5. The importance of telling others about your goals
6. A challenge to students to set their own long term and short term goals, and to share them with each other, their families, you, and your mentor.

You may want to prepare for watching the video lesson by:

1. Planning for vocabulary development as needed
2. Choosing an anchor text about goal setting
3. Thinking over what sort of anchor chart or graphic organizer you will want to use
4. Preparing a place in your classroom to display student goals throughout the year, or to help students record their progress over the year.

I'm sharing lots of information that might be helpful. Please pick and chose what makes sense to you.

Mentor texts and read alouds will be at the bottom of this blog entry.

Vocabulary Development

• Create a working definition of "Goal." The mentor videos have some really good ideas on this, and it might even be worth watching just the first minute of several to see different people's takes on this topic.
• Aspects of goal setting to take into account when creating a definition might be:
• specific
• measurable
• time related
• something the person wants to do (personal investment)
• can be broken down into steps
• with support, it is something a person could really make happen

Need a video?

This four-minute animated TedEd video by Steve talks about decision making, consistency, and sometimes adjusting the plan on the way to a goal.

Anchor charts, graphic organizers, and displaying goals

The target chart (goal in the center and small steps to that in surrounding circles) and a pyramid (first introduced in this classic video lesson) have both been effective graphic organizers over the years.

This blogger uses a hand as a graphic organizer.

Quotes to Inspire Discussion

Teachers use these to spark discussion, as writing prompts, as a greeting in the morning on the board.

“Failure is an opportunity to begin again more intelligently”

- Henry Ford

“The biggest mistake you could ever make, is continually fearing you’ll make one”

- Elbert Hubbard

“Giving up on your goal because of one setback is like slashing your other three tires because you got a flat”

- Unknown

“A goal properly set is halfway reached.” - Zig Ziglar

●      Goodread’s list of quotes about goal setting

●      Top 15 Goal setting quotes here.

●      Inspirational quotes about goals and goal setting.

●      50 goal quotes that will inspire and motivate you.

●      25 inspirational success quotes

Small Bits of Inspiration

●      A google image search for “goals + inspiration” yields great visuals to inspire your goal setting practices!

●      On the Importance of Goals - 6 Reasons Why You Need to Set Goals

●      Some funny, some touching, all inspiring on this Edublog - “The Best Video Clips on Goal Setting”

●      One-Step-at-a-Time Goal Achieving Cartoon Doodle Video

●      Good visual reminder - “5 Ways to Follow Through on Your Goals”

Ideas specifically for olders:

You might like this Omeleto video of a spoken word poet talking about regrets, and how taking healthy risks is good and we all need to magnify our gifts.

This article is about identifying a need in the world, and going after the solution. Steve’s TEDx Calgary talk relates to this as well.

A few interesting resources for you as a learner:

CC friend (and Steve’s former coach) Stu MacMillian is an interesting follow on Twitter and Instagram. He is a big reader, and often summarizes big ideas on his feed. Here are his thoughts on how to give feedback around goals.

NPR recently reported on a research project in participated in writing exercises around goal setting erased the gender and race gap among 700 students. 

A TED playlist of goal setting and decision making talks, including one of my favorite TED talks ever: Diana Nyad and her swim from Cuba to the US at age 64.

How goal setting -- and running -- help the homeless, from All Things Considered.

Anchor texts for Goal Setting

The best way to learn about setting and accomplishing goals is to analyze the methods of people who have successfully done that. Biographical texts of innovators and accomplished people are going to lay out the process in an easily understood way. Finding a biography of someone relevant to another subject area you are working on this month is a great way to integrate College Champions topics into your core curriculum. 

Here are some favorites, appropriate for most grade levels. The links are to Goodread because those listings contain the information that you need to order the book from the library.

Read Alouds & Mentor Texts (Picture Books)

Beautiful Oops! - Barney Saltzbur            

Giant Steps to Change the World - Spike Lee

The Dot - Peter H. Reynolds

Ish - Peter H Reynolds

The Most Magnificent Thing - Ashley Spires

The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes - Mark Pett

It’s OK to Make Mistakes - Todd Parr

Your Fantastic, Elastic Brain - JoAnn Deak

What Do You Do With An Idea? - Kobi Yamada

Keep an eye out! The companion, What Do You Do With a Problem? is about the be released!

Rosie Revere, Engineer - Andrea Beaty

In the same series, check out Iggy Peck, Architect & Ada Twist, Scientist

There - Mary-Louise Fitzpatrick

Captain Arsenio: Inventions and (Mis)adventures in Flight - Pablo Bernasconi

The Perfect Percival Priggs - Julie-Anne Graham

●      Goal Setting picture books for kids here.

●      Best children’s books for teaching about goal setting and ambition here.

●      Read alouds to inspire hopes and dreams here.

●      14 Books to inspire children to follow their dreams (many great biographical stories with stunningly beautiful pictures)

Read Alouds (Novels & Non-Fiction)

Arcady’s Goal - Eugene Yelchin

Teddy Mars Book #1: Almost a World Record Breaker - Molly Burnham

For middle school students, try the narrative, nonfiction profiles of innovators and dreamers in magazines like National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Wired, and Fast Company.

Want more? A roundup of biographies by Goodreads, Barnes and Nobel (including some graphic novels and books for older students), and Powell's Books (mostly middle readers).

This list from A Mighty Girl features inspirational books with and for girls, including hard work, perseverance, and goal setting.

For middle school students, I am also a big fan of the narrative nonfiction profiling innovators and dreamers in magazines like National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Wired, and Fast Company.

Planning Resources: Welcome to Our Journey (mentoring and CC)

Welcome to Our Journey  

Following are some ideas for how to explore this topic with your students. Given that this subject will be paired with Goal Setting, these are brief resources intended to give some context to the mentoring relationship to help you with the reveal of your student athlete mentor.

Family newsletter for Welcome to Our Journey in English and Spanish.

The big ideas of this topic are:

• Introduce College Champions
• Explain the mentoring relationship
• Give some context about the lessons of sport
• Reveal the mentor, and learn a bit about him or her (lots of ideas for this in the recorded session)

Following are a few resources for you to consider in planning your lessons.

College Champions:
College Champions pilot highlights film (about three minutes)

College Champions is programming that is part of the Classroom Champions organization. More about Classroom Champions here: Op-ed piece by Steve about CC in the Buffalo News. Steve featured in Sports Illustrated “Athletes who care.” Good for kids to use as a close read.

Lessons from Sport:

Sports are often considered a microcosm of society as a whole. Although the bad stuff gets lots of press, there are lots of good things too, and lessons to be learned as a spectator and as a participant. Below are a few collections of articles about the best of us all, as seen through sports.

Inspiring moments from college sports (NCAA.org)

Huffington Post collection of positive sports stories.

Sports Illustrated profiles of athletes who overcame the odds, in a variety of ways.

Mentoring:

Alumni mentor Ryan Cochrane and mentoring, with a lot of mentions of Classroom Champions and what being a mentor means to him.

One high school is placing an emphasis on mentors (The Atlantic)

Dwayne Johnson and the power of his high school teacher who mentored him (Oprah)

Huffington Post article on mentoring and the Muhammad Ali Center’s mentoring initiative by CC friend Dr. Eli Wolff

Quotes:

Lots of teachers use these as conversation starters, quick write topics, or to greet kids in the morning with a quote on the board.

“A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.”       

-       Oprah Winfrey

Goodread’s list of quotes about Mentoring.

More quotes about mentorship here.

Read Alouds & Mentor Texts (Picture Books)

These links go to Goodreads, which contains reviews and all the info you would need to order these books from your school or public library system. We have a love of biographies, inclusion, and books on good relationships. 

Flora & the Penguin - Molly Idle

Flora takes to the ice and forms an unexpected friendship with a penguin. Twirling, leaping, spinning, and gliding, on skates and flippers, the duo mirror each other's graceful dance above and below the ice. But when Flora gives the penguin the cold shoulder, the pair must figure out a way to work together for uplifting results.

Wilma Unlimited: How Wilma Rudolph Became the World's Fastest Woman - Kathleen Krull

Before Wilma Rudolph was five years old, polio had paralyzed her left leg. Everyone said she would never walk again. But Wilma refused to believe it. Not only would she walk again, she vowed, she'd run. And she did run--all the way to the Olympics, where she became the first American woman to earn three gold medals in a single olympiad.

A Dance Like Starlight: One Ballerina's Dream - Kristy Dempsey

Little ballerinas have big dreams. Dreams of pirouettes and grande jetes, dreams of attending the best ballet schools and of dancing starring roles on stage. But in Harlem in the 1950s, dreams don’t always come true—they take a lot of work and a lot of hope. And sometimes hope is hard to come by. But the first African-American prima ballerina, Janet Collins, did make her dreams come true. And those dreams inspired ballerinas everywhere, showing them that the color of their skin couldn’t stop them from becoming a star. In a lyrical tale as beautiful as a dance en pointe, Kristy Dempsey and Floyd Cooper tell the story of one little ballerina who was inspired by Janet Collins to make her own dreams come true.

Touch the Sky: Alice Coachman, Olympic High Jumper - Ann Malaspina

A biography of the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal, from her childhood in segregated Albany, Georgia, in the 1930s, through her recognition at the 1996 Olympics as one of the hundred best athletes in Olympic history. Includes bibliographical references.

Can I Play Too? (Elephant & Piggy #12) - Mo Willems

In Can I Play Too? Gerald and Piggie meet a new snake friend who wants to join in a game of catch. But don't you need arms to catch?

Read Alouds (Novels & Non-Fiction)

The Crossover - Kwame Alexander

Josh has more than basketball in his blood, he's got mad beats, too, that tell his

family's story in verse, in this fast and furious middle grade novel of family and

brotherhood.

Loved it? Check out Alexander’s soccer themed follow up (also in verse) Booked

Absolutely, Almost - Lisa Graff

An inspiring novel about figuring out who you are and doing what you love. Albie has never been the smartest kid in his class. He has never been the tallest. Or the best at gym. Or the greatest artist. Or the most musical. In fact, Albie has a long list of the things he's not very good at. But then Albie gets a new babysitter, Calista, who helps him figure out all of the things he is good at and how he can take pride in himself.

El Deafo - Cece Bell

This funny perceptive graphic novel memoir about growing up hearing impaired is also an unforgettable book about growing up, and all the super and super embarrassing moments along the way.