Growth Mindset is a hot teaching topic and one our school sent us off last summer encouraging us to learn more about. As a psychology major back in college, I knew this was right up my alley. I’d heard about the book Mindset, by Carol S. Dweck, Ph. D. many times, but I’d never found the time to actually sit and read it. Confession…I never did find the time to sit and actually read it last summer, but I did discover how amazing Audible.com is for this busy mom who spends hours in her car schlepping teens around town. I had that 8-hour 34-minute book “read” in 1 week thankyouverymuch!
Disclosure: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. Clicking on any affiliate links on this site allows us to earn a small fee to maintain our blog, but there is no additional cost to you, the customer.
It was a great place to start and gave me all the information I needed to wrap my own mind around the growth mindset personally and professionally.
I continued my learning with some great professional development books for Growth Mindset. Click the book titles to link to our Flutter Girl Goodies Amazon shop.
Ready-to-Use Resources for Mindsets in the Classroom
All of these were great resources for gathering ideas on implementation, but I still felt like it just wasn’t quite kid-friendly enough for us. I was searching for a way to reach our young learners who unfortunately were displaying signs of being in the fixed mindset from the first day of school.
We realized early on that our class was fixed and we needed to work hard to change their mindsets.
“Do you like my work?”
“Is this perfect?”
“That’s too hard for me. I don’t want to do it.”
We struggled with what we could do about it but knew two things…This particular class was at their absolute best when we were reading stories aloud to them and they would pretty much eat pudding out of your hands if you teach them to sing songs.
So, stories and songs it was!
There are so many great books out there for teaching and sharing the growth mindset with young children. We find reading stories provides a great platform for fostering class discussions. When we can’t quite find the words ourselves, these books help us set the stage to foster the discussion.
Here a few of our favorites:
The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes
Thanks for the Feedback, I Think
Now when it came to the songs, we couldn’t find anything to fit the bill.
So, we’re the crazy ladies who decided to just write them themselves!
We came up with 20 simple songs for growing class mindsets. Each song is set to a familiar children’s tune. Our class loves singing songs and our Mindset Melodies bring our brains and voices together for class sing-alongs that we hope they’ll be humming for years to come.
We really wanted these songs to become integrated into our weekly lesson plans, so we created several activities to help our class learn and practice our Mindset Melodies.
20 Growth Mindset Melodies Color Class Song Posters
20 Growth Mindset Melodies Black and White Class Song Posters
20 Growth Mindset Melodies Pocket Chart Song Lyric Cards
20 Growth Mindset Melodies Build a Song Activity Work Mats
20 Growth Mindset Melodies Song Fill-In Activity Sheet Printables
Mindset Melodies have been a great addition to our classroom culture and daily routine. We know enough tunes now that we choose one or two of them to practice each morning as part of our morning routine. We integrate the activities into our centers time and guided reading lessons. We overhear them singing our Mindset Melodies quietly while they’re working at their desks and we don’t hear many pleas for teacher reassurance because they have a better understanding of how their mindsets are growing.
Mindsets are growing in a fun, friendly way in our classroom and our hearts are fluttering!
