Fun games to GROW your BRAIN!

Did you know the brain is like a muscle? 

The more you embrace challenges and failures, the stronger your brain will grow!

Here are a few awesome games you might consider buying for home to help strengthen the brain through productive struggle and problem solving.

Think Tank

ShapeOmetry

Rush Hour

Zupelz

Pentaminoes

SET

Chocolate Fix

Armchair Philosopher Ms. Bonsignore on the subject of cultivating resilient, gritty, persevering children: 

(Can you tell I just finished a graduate course on Growth Mindset?)

By now we’ve all acquired the buzz words that have been circulating about the importance of raising resilient children who are brimming with grit and perseverance. As parents, we have heard time and again that if we want successful children, we have to let them fail. Yet rarely do we actually follow this wisdom. In fact, it seems quite the opposite. From a teacher perspective, there continues to be an omnipresence of ‘helicopter parenting;’ the parents who swoop in to solve their children’s problems, and pave the road smooth so their children never get to experience a failure, and thus do not experience the elation that follows when you succeed after a failure. This is often done with the best of intentions. We want happy children! Of course we do. And if your child is unhappy, and you think you can fix it by making a few phone calls or sending an email, you do it. I don't mean to over generalize, and I do know that many parents are trying to incorporate recent research with our parental instinct to protect our children.

So why is protecting our children from disappointment and failure a problem? The reality is that the single best way to ensure your children (our students) will grow up to be well adjusted, motivated, self-regulated adults, is to let them struggle, make mistakes, and fail. Reframing failure as a necessary part of success can be helpful for children. Thinking of mistakes as information, not as punishment, is also handy. It takes incredible courage to take a risk, make a mistake, fail, get back up, and GROW!

Your children should not struggle alone! When children and students make mistakes and experience failure, it is imperative that they feel supported and cared for through the process. In fact, failure brings us one step closer to accomplishing our goals. I love sharing with children the many examples of famous, successful people in the world who failed hundreds of times and DID NOT GIVE UP. For example, Thomas Edison made thousands of unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When asked how it felt to fail all those times, Edison replied, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work!" Steve Jobs dropped out of college and was literally fired from the very company he founded. Albert Einstein was thought to be dumb because he didn’t speak until he was four years old and had many ‘odd’ interests as a boy that were different from his peers.

One way to support your child’s growth mindset is by sharing your own failures with them. Let them see you make mistakes and how you grow from them. Let them know how proud you are of them when they persevere through challenges instead of giving up. Praise the effort, not the product. Set a tone that equally celebrates failures with successes and file all of the above under INFORMATION for a HAPPY LIFE.