Resources: Welcome to Our Journey

Welcome to Our Journey

This video lesson may contain two big points:

1. The student athlete introduces himself and his sport.
2. The student athlete defines her relationship with the kids, and what to expect over the program in a general way.

You may want to prepare for watching the video lesson by:

1. Giving some background information about College Champions
2. Building context about the Olympics
3. Designing a Big Reveal for your students to place value on the mentor relationship

Monthly Summaries due by January 30, surveys for grade 4+ are to be done prior to introducing the student athletes and the program.

We'll start with preparing for the video lesson. I'm sharing lots of information that might be helpful. Please pick and chose what makes sense to you.

About College Champions:

This article about Steve and Classroom Champions in Sports Illustrated is a nice place to start for kids.

Need a cat video? This one introduces the idea of being an adventurer, doing things you didn't think you could do, and basically the growth mindset. 

It might also be worth setting a Google alert for news about your student athlete or his or her Penn team. Here's how.

The Big Reveal can be so, so simple. The purpose is to place value on the mentor relationship by making it exciting for the kids to get to know the student athlete. They might be super excited to learn his or her name, or to watching the first video together. Be sure and get some video or photos of that because that is super fun for the student athletes to see.

Some ideas:

1. A simple sentence strip a day that includes a fact about your mentor.
2. A large photograph of your athlete, cut into squares, and during transitions or morning openings each day for a week you flip over one or two squares and tell something about the mentor.
3. A 20-questions type exercise where kids "vote" on whether they think that the mentor is male or female, winter or summer, racing or playing a game... options here are endless. If you want to tech it up, consider a PowToon that asks these type of questions and has photos of many mentors that drop out one by one until your mentor is left.

Are students curious about mentors and advice? A teacher in the core program suggests The Strange Case of Origami Yoda for a story about receiving and following advice. The link here is to Amazon so that you have all the info you need to order it from your library.

Responding to your student athlete:

The Welcome to Our Journey videos don't have a challenge because we know you are settling into the new year. If you feel so moved, you could:

1. Write a simple sentence or two post in Google+ in the comments section below the video. This is always appreciated.
2. Post the photos or a short film clip of the kids watching the first video lesson or finding out the mentor's name.
3. Send a simple video saying hello, and showing your student athlete your classroom or school. Less than three minutes is the perfect length for all teacher and student produced videos.
4. Welcome your athlete to your classroom with some photos of your class and school, and post it with a paragraph about you (maybe even written by a kid and transcribed by you for Google+)