They Never Gave Up

Grade level

Grades 3–5

Time

About 25 minutes

Topic

Growth mindset

Answer key

Yes, page 2 of the PDF

Kids practice

Growth mindset, Perseverance, Positive self-talk, Learning from mistakes

What kids do

Printed on the sheet:

1. Draw a line from each person to the setback they kept going through.
2. Their gliders crashed again and again before their first airplane flight in 1903.
3. He tested thousands of materials to make a light bulb that would glow for a long time.
4. He did not make his high school’s top basketball team when he tried out at 15.
5. His first children’s book was turned down by more than 20 publishers.
6. She had polio as a child and wore a leg brace, then won three
7. Olympic gold medals in running.
8. Twelve publishers said no to her first Harry Potter book.

Teacher tip

Let kids research one person further and share a fact with the class.

How to use it

• Celebrate a “mistake of the day” where the class learns from an error.
• Connect it to a real hard task, like a tricky math page.
• Model your own answer first. Kids open up more when the grown-up goes first.

Watch for

Praise for being “smart”. Try praising the effort or the strategy instead.

Talk about it

• What is something you couldn’t do last year that you can do now?
• How might someone else see it differently?

Take it further

Keep a learning journal where kids note one thing that was hard and how they kept going.

US Letter, prints well in black and white. Free for home and classroom use: print as many copies as you need.