Perseverance and Resilience Teaching Resources

Are you teaching perseverance and resilience to your students this year? These core components of social and emotional learning help kids learn to bounce back after challenges and move forward in the face of struggle, so how do you teach them? The Teach Starter teacher team has the activities, worksheets and more resources you need to do just that!

Explore teacher-created digital and printable resources created to help you foster these skills in your classroom this school year and set your students up for success.

Is this your first year teaching this part of the SEL curriculum? Read on for a primer from our teacher team, including some helpful kid-friendly definitions of both perseverance and resilience that you can share with your students!

What Is Resilience? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Perhaps the first step to teaching kids to be resilient is actually giving them a definition so they know what the word means! Here's a handy definition we use with our students:

Resilience is the ability to bounce back or recover quickly from challenging situations. When we show resilience, we show that we have the strength and mental toughness that help us adapt and keep going, even when we face setbacks or fail at a particular task.

What Is Perseverance? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Of course, you can't define one term and not the other. What does it mean when you ask your students to persevere? Here's how we define perseverance for students:

Perseverance means not giving up even when we face challenges or obstacles. When we persevere, we show determination and persistence to keep going toward our goals.

Perseverance vs. Resilience — How to Explain the Difference

Perseverance and resilience are both important aspects of achieving our goals and overcoming challenges, which can make it hard for younger students to tell the difference. So how do you explain how they're different? Try this:

• Perseverance is about moving forward — no matter how hard things get.
• Resilience is about bouncing back — even when things get hard.

It's subtle, but putting these SEL skills in terms of movement can make them easier to understand!