As you know, this year one of our ISB focus areas is to understand and apply our Learner Attributes. Recently there was an article that we wrote for Touchstone explaining more about this. Below is an excerpt from that article, highlighting the attribute of being Adaptable, and what parents can do at home to support.
One of our six learner attributes is Adaptable.
Here are some of the things parents can do at home to help children be more adaptable:
-Be the example. Children watch how their parents react, and learn how they should react. When things don’t go as planned, model flexibility. Keep things light and talk out alternative solutions with your child. Embrace a new adventure that wasn’t planned. We have plenty of opportunities for this when traveling to new countries and experiencing new cultures.
-Play board games/card games and make up new rules together. Consider changing the instructions and even how the board looks.
-Teach self-talk when a problem arises. Model flexible problem solving, and do this out loud. Then explicitly teach your child how to self-talk when things go differently than planned.
-Tell jokes, use puns, and enjoy play on words. This develops flexibility with language and supports adaptable thinking.
-Go outside! Notice the changes in nature, the variability in things that are alive, and talk about the environment needing to adapt.
-Model “Failing Forward.” Talk about how mistakes are celebrated and are opportunities to grow. Use your own examples and talk about how we all make mistakes everyday and what you learn from them.
-Finally, find books that include characters who are adaptable. Read these together and talk about how the characters are adaptable and how this helps the character in the story. Look for books that take predictable plots and turn them upside-down. The unexpected becomes fun! The following books are good examples:
Ella, of course! By Sarah Weeks
Not a Box by Antoinette Portis
The Water Princess by Susan Verde
Duck! Rabbit! By Amy Krouse Rosenthal
The Wolf Who Cried Boy by Bob Hartman
The Three Little Tamales by Eric A. Kimmel
The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A. Wolf, as told to him by Jon Scieszka
Goldilocks and the Three Bears by James Marshall
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen
The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires (we read this at our Welcome Assembly this year)
Enjoy the freedom that being adaptable with your children can bring. Life does not always go according to plan. Supporting children to adapt to the changing nature of our world, and to the complexities of being human is one of the greatest gifts we can give them. A notable scientist once said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”