For a downloadable version of the Activity Guide, click here!
For this week’s short game, click here.
For this week’s challenge, click here.
Overview
This Empower Session takes a close look at the importance of staying persistent. It is a useful skill to be able stick with something until you get better at it. I bet you can think of some times when you’ve had to be persistent in order to accomplish something.
Here are a few tips that will help us all stay persistent:
- Identify Your Wants and Desires — You can do this by writing down specifically all the things you want to have or accomplish. List all of your desires and wants, no matter how impossible they are to achieve in the moment.
- Determine Your Motivation — Motivation comes from a deep reason why we want to achieve or have something. If you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, it gives you more energy to keep moving.
- Keep a Positive Mental Attitude — In order to develop persistence and eventually succeed in your mission, always maintain a positive mental attitude, regardless of the situation. Keep your thoughts focused on taking action towards your goals.
Staying persistent is a very important trait to develop in life because it has a direct impact with on your self-improvement. You will only get better in life by failing at things, learning from those experiences and moving on.
This lesson can be completed in 10 minutes.
Definitions
Persistence- Persistence is the ability to stick with a difficult task. Persistence is trying again and again even when you are not successful. Resilience and perseverance are synonyms for persistence.
Materials
- Paper
- Tape
- Scissors
Benefits of persistence
In the video, we shared a few tips on how to stay persistent. Below, you will find a few of the benefits that come from staying persistent:
- Turn failure into learning — If you persist through challenging tasks, rather than seeing failure, you see opportunities to learn and grow.
- Inspire others and lead — If other peers, friends or family members see you persist, they may adopt your efforts and persist through their own tasks and challenges.
- Accomplish more — It is simple, the more you persist through certain tasks and challenges, the more you will get done. Your list of accomplishments will start to grow
There are many reasons why staying persistent can help us succeed. Keep these benefits in mind the next time that you have a list of tasks to accomplish.
Activity overview — Paper plane
The goal of this game is to create your own paper plane and see how far it can fly.
Paper airplanes are an art and it can take a couple of tries or even a couple of different designs to get it just right. Let’s create a basic paper airplane. Here is how you make it:
- Fold the paper in half vertically
- Unfold the paper and fold each of the top corners into the center line
- Fold the top edges into the center line
- Fold the plane in half toward you
- Fold the wings down, matching the top edges up with the bottom edge of the body
- Optional: Add double stick tape to the inside of the body
Make up your own design or look up other designs to test out. You may have to be persistent to get your folding and designs just right, but if you keep trying you can make an awesome paper airplane!
Activity overview — 21 questions
The goal of the activity is to ask up to 21 questions and guess the person, place or thing that your friend or family member is thinking of.
First, select one person to think of a person, place or thing. It can be anything!
Next, the guessers (this game can be played with up to six players), will take turns asking questions. The person selected to pick a person, place or thing will have to answer those questions honestly and accurately.
The first person to guess the person, place or thing has won the game and now takes a turn to select their own person, place or thing.
This is a great activity that can be played over the phone as well. Feel free to challenge anyone!
Bonus activities — Paper tower
This bonus game will use some of the same skills from the paper airplane game. You will be building a paper tower. You can only use paper and tape to build the tallest possible tower. Challenge a friend to see who can make the tallest tower!
First, think of a design that you think will be a good, tall tower.
Then, use paper, scissors and tape to build your tower. Remember that your tower cannot be taped to the table or wall. It must stand up on it’s own.
If your tower falls down, don’t worry! You can just rebuild it and be persistent!
Other resources
Check out @ironatchman on Instagram! He’s a gym teacher who shares fun activities you can do at home!
If you like learning about animals and the environment, check out the NatGeo kids website. They have games, articles, science experiments, and more that will help you learn about science!