Fail means First Attempt In Learning. This is what is written on the first page of my daughter's Fail Kit book. I received a free copy of this book from Elaine Haren - Parenting Coach last year. We worked through it this school year and I just wanted to share the wisdom that me and my daughter learned from this workbook.
The first thing that we learned was to make a mantra for ourself. My daughter used to not like the feeling she gets when she fails or if things doesn't go as she planned. There was even a time when she simply just stopped trying new things all because she does not want to fail. The universe may have heard my plea for help that's why I stumbled upon this book. My daughter formed her own mantra and she came up with something really full of wisdom.
It's okay to fail, because you always learn a lesson. You can always try again. You can always do better next time.
I love how she made this mantra after thinking about if for quite a while. I gave it to her as an assignment and it was surprising how she came up with this. We talked about how failure is not something that anyone should be ashamed of. It is a proof that a person tried to learn something new, and when they failed at it, they get to have another chance. The idea of this workbook is to remove that "bad rep" that the word failure has to people. I'm glad she picked that up and chose to take the idea that failing means she can just try again and do better next time.
The workbook has a lot more activities. There's a part of the book where she was asked to choose a famous personality and we get to study them and see the journey they went through before they became successful. She was on her Harry Potter season when we did the Fail Kit so she chose J.K. Rowling. We looked up J.K. Rowling's life and we found several videos and that's when she found out some of the things that her favorite author went through.
I realized that success is so much romanticized, we forget to look at the journey that these successful people went through. That before they achieved success, they went through tons of failures. And that the only difference they made was that they powered through every failure until they reached the top. Through the Fail Kit, we realized that failure, should not just be recognized, it should be accepted as part of the process.
Another activity she made was the online human bingo. This was supposed to be done on a reunion but since my little learner was excited, we decided to do it online. She messaged her aunts, uncles, Tito Lolos, and Tita Lolas to help her out with her activity. The activity made her see how real people, close to her, experienced failure and she learned the different ways they coped with it. Some said that when they failed, they took a break and checked to see if they still wanted to try again. If they do, they go at it again and approach it differently. She also learned that even grownups still has so much more to learn. The activity made them so human in her eyes. You know how it is that when we were young, we either despise our titos and titas so much or love and admire them? This activity opened up some parts of her aunts and uncles that allowed my daughter to get to know them better.
A recommendation that the workbook gave was to do a lot of board games. My daughter learned to play chess a little long way back and we've introduced a few more board games to her since. At first, we would let her win just so we could help explain the rules of the game. It's like a 3-4 trial games. Then after that, we play the real game and let her feel how it is to lose. At first we would talk about what she missed, then figure out how to best tackle it the next time she encounters it again. On the next few games, even until now, she learned how to figure out what went wrong and she conjures a plan how to approach the next game. Losing does help build character.
After finishing the book, she became a little less apprehensive when it comes to trying new things. This was the reason she tried out boxing and now, she's prepping to get into swimming for the first quarter of her 3rd grade.
