Every parent wants their child to be happy and realize their dreams. Inculcating a growth mentality has been strongly associated with fulfillment and happiness. Great things follow when children are aware that their minds can grow. The big question is, how do you assist your child in adopting this mentality? Let’s check out 18 fun growth mindset activities for kids.
Herein are nine pointers and strategies to help your children develop a growth mentality through growth mindset activities.
1. Teach Them “How Can I Do This and That?”
This mentality approach is often taught to adults but is also applicable to children. You’ll often find yourself thinking, “I can’t accomplish this task.”
An individual with a growth mentality will ask themselves, “HOW can I accomplish this task?”
Do you see the difference? By changing your mentality, you start a new line of thought. The best part is that you invite possibility and creativity rather than giving up.
Therefore, the next time your children use the phrase “can’t,” ask them how instead.
Grit refers to how much you will persevere until you realize the objectives you’ve set. Grit is the amount of effort you will put into your work and your preparedness to prevail over challenges and keep going.
To develop grit, you have to find something passionate and exciting and improve it. Another way to think of it is to grow, improve, and succeed in that field over time.
To develop grit, associate yourself with individuals who also have grit. Find people committed to realizing their goals and work closely with them. The more you surround yourself with them, the more you will be like them.
At dinner time, you can vary the “high and low” by telling your children to communicate something good that happened as well as something “gritty.” To put it in other words, share an experience that made you more determined.
If you do this every night at supper, you’re teaching growth mindset to every family member and encouraging them to search for new challenges and opportunities for growth.
3. Create Some Affirmations and Have Your Kids Say Them Regularly
Over time, affirmations can change your perspective. Therefore, you should use affirmations to change your mentality. Put some of these affirmations to the test:
- If I can’t complete a particular task, I have not figured out how yet.
- I can complete challenging tasks.
- Difficulties make me stronger.
- I preserve even in the most challenging situations.
- I have the capability of discovering new ways to solve challenges.
- I give my all in everything I do.
You can say these affirmations while showering or have your children say them as they take their breakfast.
4. Help them Define Growth Mindset
The next step involves having your children try defining a growth mentality. Do not give your kids the answer, as tempting as it may be.
At the end of this booklet, they’ll get an opportunity to go over this topic again—it will be fascinating to see how much they have taken in.
When children have had an opportunity to define growth mentality independently, you can expound on what having a growth mentality entails. You can explain it as:
- “Each person has their unique way of perceiving things. We can refer to this as our mentality—how we perceive the world and encounter things in life.”
- “Your mentality determines how you view yourself.”
- “When someone has a growth mentality, it implies that they comprehend that their brain can learn anything as long as they put in the effort and willpower.”
- “Conversely, an individual with a rigid mentality is more likely to give up easily and get discouraged when they can’t accomplish a particular task or make an error.”
- “It’s essential to understand that making mistakes is good as they assist us in problem-solving.”
- “It is okay when we feel like giving up once in a while. However, you should choose to have a growth mentality and keep striving to reach your objective.”
5. Have Some Time and Set Goals
Next in our list of growth mindset activities is setting goals helps build our belief in ourselves.
Having objectives isn’t just about mapping out your future and holding yourself answerable to every element.
It can be as simple as learning new skills such as skateboarding, planting a garden, or skateboarding for children.
Setting goals should be fun and should inspire you instead of feeling like a significant burden on your shoulders.
Let your child come up with their own goals. Don’t try to influence your child to add academic excellence as a goal.
6. Try to Fix Negative Self-Talk
In line with our previous activity, this article can help your child start changing their thought process. It assists them in identifying the self-deprecating things they tell themselves.
Next, it gives them a new expression to use instead. This is another approach you can provide your learners to utilize when learning something new.
7. Teach About the Brain
Students become more enthusiastic about the learning process once they discover that the brain forms new connections as they exercise and master something.
For instance, if you have a kid that is frustrated about their abilities in a sport, say basketball, you may be tempted to think it’s too much for them, especially if you are not skilled in basketball.
Instead of dissuading them from playing the sport, you can tell the kid that as they practice, their brain is rewiring itself and establishing novel connections that make it simpler the subsequent times. Doing this will make them more enthusiastic about developing their skills.
When students know how their brains grow and work, they start cultivating a growth mentality.
8. Help Your Kids Model a Growth Mindset
It doesn’t matter how much you teach your kids to develop a growth mentality. An ideal method for kids to cultivate a growth mentality is cultivating their own.
Children often learn by observing the behaviors of the adults around them. One of the best ways your children can understand this is when they overhear you voicing your thoughts when you go through a rough patch.
Rather than saying, “This is too difficult.”
Say, “This is particularly challenging for me. I suppose I should continue practicing.”
Rather than saying, “I am not capable of doing this.”
You can say, “I am yet to learn how to do this.”
Those are only two limitless instances of having and embodying a growth mentality.
The ideal method of teaching a growth mentality in your kids is to have a growth mentality yourself.
9. Have Some Time to Show Your Children Your Struggles
If you tend to hide your mistakes from your kids, you might find it difficult to model a growth mentality. Hiding mistakes is an innate instinct since you want to protect your kids.
However, showcasing your challenges can be a long-term gift to your kids in this instance.
Therefore, attempt to talk about your mistakes—even the best of us make mistakes—the difference is how we perceive them and what we learn from them.
One element of having a growth mentality is perceiving failure as a catapult for growth.
When your kids see your failures and how you overcome them—building blocks for growth—they will be more prepared to emulate you.
10. Set a Time and Praise Effort
Next in our growth mindset activities list. The best way to cultivate a growth mindset is to teach children that their brains work the same way as muscles. They have to strengthen it with persistence and hard work.
As a parent, you should praise effort rather than the outcome.
For instance:
Applaud the effort your child has put into accomplishing or achieving something (“You’ve worked so hard to find a solution to that problem!”) instead of commending them for an apparent permanent character (“You’re brilliant!”)
The former is called process praise, and the latter is called people praise.
Process praise encourages an inner feeling of self-efficacy. It underlines that successes result from effort (which is within your child’s control) instead of some fixed standard of skill or talent.
Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford University, carries out exciting research on this subject. She first came up with a definition of growth and fixed mindsets, and she wanted to find out whether the type of praise used by parents impacted their children as they were growing.
Dweck collaborated with University of Chicago researchers to look into how mums praised their kids at one, two, and three years of age. After five years, they checked back with them.
After the research, Dweck told Quartz that they discovered that the process of praise projected the success of the kid in school and aspiration for a challenge after five years.
She added that the more the kids embraced a growth mindset in second grade, the better they performed in fourth grade, and the correlation was remarkable.
Applaud effort above outcome.
11. Read Some Mindset Books Together
Next in our fun growth mindset activities list is reading. Tales are an incredible way to acquire knowledge on a growth mindset and witness it in action. Below is a list of great books associated with growth mindsets, categorized by age:
- A Walk in the Rain with a Brain by Edward Hallowell
- When Pigs Fly by Valerie Coulman
- Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn for Kids by John C. Maxwell
- Making a Splash – Growth Mindset for Kids by Carol Reiley
- Bubble Gum Brain by Julia Cook
- Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty
- I Knew You Could: A Book for All Stops in Your Life by Craig Dorfman
- My Day Is Ruined! A Story Teaching Flexible Thinking by Bryan Smith
- Thanks for the Feedback; I Think by Julia Cook
- Your Fantastic Elastic Brain: Stretch It, Shape It By JoAnn Deak
Check out more in our list of The Best Growth Mindset Children’s Books
12. Have a Session to Instill the Power of “Yet”
To acknowledge the “power of yet,” clarify to the learners that it takes practice and time to succeed in challenging tasks.
Keep on reminding them to embrace an “I can’t accomplish this YET” attitude, but that they WILL one day soon.
Get a book called Giraffes Can’t Dance and note down growth mindset points using a graphic organizer from the text.
13. Try Book Journaling
You can encourage your learners to use bullet journals to nurture a growth mindset.
A bullet journal is a free kind of journaling. For instance, it includes bullet points, highlighting, coloring and sketching.
Students typically enjoy expressing themselves freely in journals. Journals can also be an excellent way to express their understanding.
14. Free Up Some Time and Talk About Careers
According to Hall, there are two approaches to talking about careers.
- The first is an occupational paradigm, which entails picking a career path due to circumstances, remuneration, and societal status.
- The second approach is the vocational paradigm, extracted from vocare, a Latin word meaning “calling.” A career founded on the vocation paradigm results in a transformed and fulfilled life as one’s occupation is lined up with their purpose.
Instead of asking, “What would you like to be when you grow up?”, ask, “What would you like to do when you grow up?” Or better yet, “What do you enjoy doing now?”
According to Hall, motivating someone to learn about a “blend of talents and gifts special to them” results in fulfilling futures that cause a tangible effect in society.
Rather than following a particular route based on a whimsical job position, the young man thinks about their interests and skills. Instead of “I’d like to be an electrical technician,” it’s “I love fixing things. I’m great at resolving problems.”
Immediately you develop these interests; you can apply them anywhere; you’re not doomed to a fixed mindset or path.
15. Do Some Yoga With Them
Yoga is a perfect activity for youthful people—it helps mindfulness, flexibility, and breathing. Young people can carry out positive affirmations during yoga poses by characterizing positive features of a growth mindset to every exercise.
For example, the lunge pose relates to having an open mind. While they pose, they visualize how they can achieve open-mindedness to accept constructive criticism and take away something from it.
Additional affirmations to assign to each yoga pose are: I’m creative, I’m caring, I work hard, I love to learn new things, and I’m focused.
16. Take the Memory Jar Challenge With Them
If your kid is a determined sportsperson, they may fill a shelf with medals and trophies. A proficient student may get certificates and reward postcards from school. But you can teach your children that they can acknowledge many accomplishments.
Another growth mindset exercise for kids is to get some paper squares and a big jar and tell your kid to log in the day’s achievements.
Furthermore, you can note something on the paper if you observed them being so kind and compassionate to younger siblings or noticed they took a sanction onboard without uproar.
A growth mindset for children is more necessary while in lockdown. Open the jar each week or after a few days to celebrate and acknowledge their accomplishments.
17. Make a Vision Board Together
Do fun growth mindset activities for kids like making vision boards. A vision board will aid them to use their ideas of growth mindset and keep them occupied for some time. You can file the vision board with beautiful photos of things you want to accomplish, nudges of growth mindset values, and inspiring growth mindset statements.
Teach the kids to perform tasks with magazines or cut out printables that you can print and pictures from the internet.
If you have a corkboard, instruct your children to pin the cutouts on it or stick them on card sheets: make use of what’s available.
18. Just Talk About Mistakes
Nothing about this is connected to appearing humble. Make your kid feel comfortable talking about every mistake along the way to teach them how to solve problems and finish work by trying a new and different strategy.
This will help them point out what they’ve tried and what hasn’t worked so they can make another attempt and determine what does work. They can also develop excellent skills for working together with others, a valuable skill in the workplace.
Start Now and Instill Growth Mindset in Your Kids
There are several things to add to the growth mindset activities list. There’s no superior approach to helping kids develop a growth mindset. The goal is to determine the activities that satisfy your needs.
Embrace the trial and error approach and experiment with new things to find what suits you when taking on a difficult task. All in all, trying these growth mindset activities will foster your mind.
Teach kids about Grit and Growth Mindset – What’s the Difference & Can They Be Used Together?
Make sure to read our tips and 25 Easy Ways to Instill Growth Mindset for Students and 26 Growth Mindset Bulletin Board Ideas
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