The very first focus of our 5th grade class (I call them ‘Mindset Topics’) is ‘How you do anything is how you do everything.’ We make little artifacts of this topic and post them to the students project boxes. These boxes will be theirs until they leave in 8th grade, covered in dozens of little reminders.

The number one thing that kids choose to write on these was to ‘slow down’. It makes sense – slow down, be careful in your work, and get good at being careful in your work.

The problem is that too many students rushed it. Their “Slow Down” was hastily put in pencil when we had enough time to make it neat and colorful.

This is so simple but cuts to the core of the problem. –I’m struggling to define it in neutral terms.–

Getting that first square right, noticing how this little, meaningless ‘anything’ was completed, this needs to be better handled on my end. It’s how we will do ‘everything’.