A BIG thing I work on with writers of all ages is self doubt. It comes up no matter who you are and it can look different at different times in your writing life.
With so many stressors on our mental health, we could all use some ways to tackle self doubt in our writing life and beyond. As I asked my students to reflect on trimester 2 and plan goals for trimester 3, I thought about my friend Carrie Baughcum and the learning mascots she creates with her students.
And then I thought, we need learning mascots!
Our goal is to be able to draw our mascots in less than one minute so we started in 1-minute intervals. We first took one minute to make a list of animals we like, and then we took one minute to pick one of those animals to draw. If a student was finished early, they could try drawing another animal. We repeated this with food, objects/things, and characters like Pac-Man or Garfield.
Next we looked at all of our drawings and thought about what would work for our personal learning mascot. I explained that a learning mascot is a doodle character we create that goes everywhere with us and cheers us on as we work on our goals.
We're still iterating and getting to know our learning mascots but I wanted to share mine. Her name is Globo (which means balloon in Spanish) and she's an uplifting, bubbly, inspirational kind of gal who wants to help you soar to the highest heights!
I drew her on my notes the other day so you can see how I can add her to all sorts of places to cheer me up and cheer me on. I already have ideas for learning mascots as well and will see if some of my students will share theirs.
I'll be sharing slides in our Patreon community to talk through how you can bring learning mascots to your students.
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