#beautiful oops

What are some of your favorite childhood books? Take a look at my latest blog post to find out what helped shape me into the reader I am now! #BookBlogger #FridayFavorites

I’ve wanted to be more active on my blog, so I decided to participate in more weekly tags! Friday Favorites is hosted by the wonderful blog Something of the Book. Basically, a prompt is given, and you get to gush about your favorites. 

This week’s prompt is Favorite Books from Childhood. As a child, I really didn’t read many books I would consider my favorite. I read because it was a way to…

beautiful oops! by Barney Saltzberg

In case you are not familiar with the children’s book Beautiful Oops by Barney Saltzberg, here is a video to get you familiar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXY8HAIwF3w

Once you watch, I encourage you to look at this post further. 

This children’s book teaches a lesson so powerful, so important, so universal that, shockingly, it can be brought up in just about any classroom from elementary to post-secondary levels. In fact, in my first level teaching methods course at Ball State, our professor showed us this book and I have never thought that a children’s book would work so well in a post-secondary classroom––or a middle school or high school classroom. But it worked perfectly! It ignited my colleagues and me thinking critically about ourselves and our infinite capabilities and how we could instill these same moral teachings to our future students. WOW! Who would have thought?

As the school year commences, teachers and students alike have very high goals which could include inspiring others to enjoy a subject, expand one’s knowledge, or receive high marks––or if you’re like myself, all of the above. The unfortunate thing that fails to be one of the goals made by students AND teachers (emphasis on AND) would be an abundance of mistakes. It shouldn’t be this way and here’s why...

Students often crave to know things, but they’d rather take the easy way out to know these things. Every day, educators are molding the minds of students that belong to high, mid, or low achieving districts and come from families of all the different socio-economic levels, most being below the poverty threshold. And a significant percentage of these students are terrified of making a mistake. The term itself has morphed into something that is very discouraging and full-of-fear. Unfortunately this leads to more and more students feeling uncomfortable to make a mistake and for having a teacher––or perhaps a peer point out there mistake, because in our world the term mistake means a big fat NO! In reality, mistakes, in the classroom, can be the most spectacular things to ever come from students. They essentially could become a “beautiful oops.” 

Why? If student’s are afraid of making mistakes, then this proves they are afraid of trying, they are afraid of what they are capable of, they are afraid of releasing their innersoles, they are afraid of so much and their openness and creativity slowly dwindles into nothingness. NOT in my classroom. NOT now. NOT ever. 

Mistakes in my classroom are merely a sequence of “beautiful oops”––a chance to identify your mistake and get better. We will turn something that maybe is mediocre or below expectations and with time and with constructive criticism and with patience and with an open-mind turn it into something beautiful, something meaningful, something worth being proud of. 

Words by the author, Barney Saltzberg

Beautiful Oops was inspired by teachers to whom I’ve show how I write and illustrate picture books.  Two of the images I show how I turned mistakes into artwork.  One is the cover of my sketchbook.  I spilled coffee on it and decided the shape looked like a monster.  The other is from an old book of mine, The Flying Garbanzos.  A dog climbed up on to my desk and walked across the paper, leaving paw prints that I couldn’t erase.  Rather than starting over, I painted clouds over each paw print.  Teachers requested that I write a book, teaching that concept.  One day, I was sitting in my studio and tore a piece of paper in half.  I decided it looked like an alligator’s mouth.  That was the beginning of Beautiful Oops.