Sometimes we just gotta share what’s in our mailbag. The note below is from a school counselor who started doing The Let Grow Experience with fifth graders this year. Next year, she is expanding it to the entire elementary school.

The Experience is a homework assignment that tells kids, once a month, “Go home and do something new, on your own – WITH your parents’ permission, but WITHOUT your parents.” (See Let Grow co-founder Jonathan Haidt describe it here.)

I visited this counselor’s school and read the “leaves” – the leaf-shaped pieces of paper kids wrote their Experiences on, and taped to a construction paper tree in the hall.

How they made me smile! The kids had done things like walked to the park, learned to do a backflip, planned a sleepover (including snacks), and made their own lunches. They’d walked to friend’s houses, and shoveled snow. Under “What did you learn?” a boy who’d made ziti wrote, “Don’t burn it.”

Everyone knows the term “life lessons.” That’s what The Let Grow Experience provides. Here’s what the counselor wrote:

Dear Let Grow:

I want to thank you personally for the Let Grow Experience. 

As a school social worker, part of my job is to provide “Social-Emotional Learning” in the form of classroom lessons. The idea, I guess, is that in 20-minute monthly lessons I can teach the children skills in how to manage conflict, understand their emotions, and learn coping strategies. I won’t expand on what I think about that premise.I’m going to sound like a commercial here, but in true sincerity: Discovering Let Grow has been such a gift, because it is a social-emotional lesson that I fully believe in and endorse. With confidence I can talk to the kids about independence, maturity, responsibility and assign them a Let Grow Experience that leads to real conversations with kids and families — not just at school but at home and in the community. One mom said to me after the first Let Grow project was assigned this year, “You’re a hero in our house.”

Well this counselor is a hero to us – as are the parents who said “Yes!” when their kids proposed new ventures, and as are the kids themselves, of course.

And that 5^th grade pasta maker is right: When you make ziti, don’t burn it.

Life is full of lessons.

Let Grow here: If you’re feeling inspired, check out our brand-new Summer Experience and Community Toolkit — more ways for kids (and parents!) to grow, explore, and learn life lessons together. Have fun!