Teach Perseverance with The Most Magnificent Thing Read Aloud

The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires presents the ideas of perseverance and growth mindset to young kids. This book is one of our favorite books for teaching kids about this theme of succeeding through a growth mindset! It is also one of our FAVORITE books for back to school! Which is why we created The Most Magnificent Thing Read Aloud.

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The Most Magnificent Thing Read Aloud for Back-to-School

You may be wondering… The Most Magnificent Thing such a great back-to-school book? Some of the reasons this read-aloud truly is a great way to kick off the school year:

• A story that teaches growth mindset

• Ready to go lesson plans to guide you through 3 days of teaching!

• Lessons that address several core reading standards

• Activities for comprehension, discussions, and writing

• Activities to help students develop their own growth mindset 

While this is one of our favorite books, we know it may be new to you. So, if you aren’t familiar with this book, here’s a quick summary of The Most Magnificent Thing. If you are already familiar with this book, go ahead and jump down the page to learn more about the read aloud that goes along with it.

The Most Magnificent Thing is about how a little girl and her dog plan to build the most magnificent thing.  Along the way, things don’t turn out the way they plan. They fail and try again many times. Eventually, the girl becomes frustrated and quits when she slams her finger. Her dog convinces her to take a walk to rejuvenate. When they return, her renewed enthusiasm helps them achieve their goal and they finally build the most magnificent thing.

Help Students Set Goals  with  Most Magnificent Thing Lesson Plan

Above, we shared a brief overview of some of the reasons we love using this book at the beginning of the school year. We love it so much though, we thought we’d share one more.

The beginning of the school year is filled with  “Getting to Know You” activities to help build positive relationships in the classroom. Beyond the standard activities, like getting to know each other’s names and interests, goal oriented activities are also a great way to get to know your students!

When students share their goals with you, it allows you to see what they hope to achieve. This is a great way for you to understand your students, and to help them understand themselves.

Using goals your students have, gives you a chance to discuss how to achieve those goals. It also opens up the conversation of what to do when they get frustrated along the way. This opens up opportunities for a discussion on growth mindset! Check out our cute Growth Mindset Bulletin Board  and other Back to School Activities

Teaching your students about a growth mindset not only teaches them about believing in themselves, but shows them that YOU believe in them too! Establishing this at the beginning of the year helps establish a safe learning environment. All important pieces in setting up a successful classroom for the year.

Now that we have told you the many reasons we love this story so much, let us share with you some of the amazing activities we created to help you teach it!

Beyond the theme, The Most Magnificent Thing is an amazing book to teach many other important literacy skills.

Meet Your Core Standards with these Magnificent Response-to-Text Activities

This story is perfect for teaching a character’s response to events and challenges. It is also perfect for looking closely at character traits. By asking text dependent questions to create a close read, students have the opportunity to really study the text and illustrations. This helps students to understand the character by analyzing her thoughts, feelings, and motivations.

In addition to analyzing the character individually, these read aloud  questions explore plot and theme as well. These questions help you guide your class through the girl’s struggles, as she learns how to have a growth mindset. These questions also allow for great conversations about the importance of a growth mindset in first grade! You may also like our 5 Best Read Aloud to Build Character

Again, we love this book because it provides the opportunity to teach students about having a growth mindset. Which means, it’s important to offer students time to make text-to-self connections while reading. The Most Magnificent Thing read aloud provides several opportunities for your students to make these connections, and explore how to create their own growth mindset!

To meet your core standards with Read Aloud lessons, there are few of our go-to activities. Two activities we love are at the beginning and end of the book. At the beginning of the book, ask your students to brainstorm a list of things they can do when something gets hard in class. This is a great way to get every student involved. It also helps students establish a personal connection with the book early on.

After reading the book, we’ve provided a culminating writing task where students write about how they can overcome challenging things. Beyond just writing individual responses, use these as a way to establish a growth mindset attitude for the WHOLE class ALL year long by sharing & posting what they write! Posting students’ responses on the bulletin board reminds them to have a growth mindset when classroom work and tasks become challenging throughout the year.

Ready to start the new year with a growth mindset?!

Everything you need in our Read Aloud Lesson  — The Most Magnificent Thing Interactive Read-Aloud. 

You may like the  Perseverance Read-Aloud Bundle  which includes the