Habit 4: Think Win-Win

Our Leader in Me school is still working on learning the 7 habits, and this week we're moving up the tree to the 4th habit, and the first interdependent one: Think Win-Win. This is a SUPER important one for my kiddos - We seem to have trouble with teamwork and coming up with solutions that work for everyone. I tried to hit this habit really hard so they would really get it: EVERYONE can win! It's just a matter of being creative and coming up with a third alternative that enables everyone to win.

Here's our week of mini-lessons:

Day 1: Again, we started out with a chapter of Sean Covey's book. The "Think Win-Win" chapter focuses on a girl who wants to make a vegetable garden, which is a win-win because she gets to garden and her mom gets to eat fresh vegetables!

Day 2: I gave the kids a few different scenarios and we tried to come up with third alternatives that could solve the problem with EVERYONE winning. Some of the scenarios I gave them were:

-There is one swing left, and two kids want to swing on it.

-Mike wants to watch Transformers. His sister wants to watch My Little Pony. They only have one TV.

-Josh isn't listening to his mom when she tells him about his chores.

-Sarah and Julie have been assigned to work on a group project together. They just got in a fight at recess and don't want to talk to each other, but the project is a big part of their grade.

Day 3: There is no Happy Kids episode for Think Win-Win, so we had to get creative for a video day! A colleague found this awesome short, "Partly Cloudy", about a cloud and a stork that aren't working together well. The cloud is making things that the stork can't carry without getting hurt, but when he makes boring things that the stork can carry easily, the cloud is sad. They end up coming up with a third alternative that makes everybody win when the cloud makes the stork a helmet and pads.

Day 4: We thought a lot about our emotional bank accounts - When we're happy, our emotional bank account is full; when we're feeling down or bad about ourselves, our EBA is being withdrawn from. Well, we wanted full emotional bank accounts! We had a great time writing affirmations for each other. Before the lesson, I wrote each student's name on 2 slips of paper. Then I mixed them all up and gave each student 2 slips with students' names and one blank one to fill in a friend's name. On the "deposit slip," the students were asked to fill their friend's emotional bank account by writing one (or more!) reasons why that person is great. Then I collected them all (I had to make sure they were all nice - and appropriate!) and passed them back out at the end of the day. They were all SO excited to see what had been written about them!

Day 5: Thumb war demonstration. They LOVED this and now are insistent that they want to have thumb wars! I split the class into two teams, and chose one person from each team to play. (We took turns so most everyone got a chance!) I gave them 30 seconds to have a thumb war - and every time someone won, their team got a piece of candy. They were cheering on their representatives like no tomorrow!! After a few rounds (and only one victory!), I asked them what a win-win would have looked like. When they said, "Everyone would have candy!", I asked them how we could have made that happen. It took them a while to come up with it, but eventually they thought of letting each other win and taking turns winning!