So You Made A Mistake…

I have found a new-to-me game to play on my phone when sitting in the airport.  It’s called Jelly Splash.  The premise of this game is to master the challenges at different levels by receiving points for eliminating “jellies” within a particular number of moves, or you could just need to eliminate the “gray slime”.  Now needless to say I am not always successful—I don’t meet the challenge.  In other words, I make mistakes:  mistakes in judgment, mistakes in connecting the most dots possible, and of course mistakes in strategy.  Yet I keep going back and playing again and again—actually it’s really “addictive”.  The question for me becomes “Why?”

Although there is a penalty for making the mistakes I make—I run out of lives and/or chances before I’ve mastered the challenge so I have to wait for a while for Jelly Splash to text me that I have new lives and the ability to try again, I can handle the mistakes simply because I know that my mistake is not fatal—I will get the opportunity to try again.  Also, those mistakes don’t happen in vain, I learn from them and can adjust my strategy to be more effective the next go round. 

If you think about it Jelly Splash certainly is a formula for success in our afterschool programs. 

1. Provide learning opportunities that are active—hands-on and minds-on.
2. Set clear expectations (Jellie says—here is the challenge)
3. Hold me accountable to accomplish the expectation or “suffer a consequence”
4. Once I’ve had the consequence, give me an opportunity to try again (and again, and again, and again if needed—don’t give up on me)
5. Help me learn from the mistakes I make

What more could we want.  Check out the C4K video entitled “So, You Made a Mistake” by clicking on this link. Think about how important it is to regroup and refresh after we make a mistake and move forward.