OOPS! ALMOST!: Persistence, the Way California Now Writes It Into Preschool

I have never filed a patent for something that worked on the first try. Not once, in more than 20 years and hundreds of inventions. Every one went through rounds of failure first. So when California published a preschool standard with the words "persisting despite difficulties" in it, I read it twice.

Where the topic comes from

The 2024 California Preschool/TK Learning Foundations added a domain the old foundations did not have: Approaches to Learning. Its first strand is Motivation to Learn, with four sub-strands: Curiosity and Interest, Initiative, Engagement, and Perseverance. The foundation statement under Perseverance is numbered 1.4 and titled Persisting Despite Difficulties. The document's introduction says why it is there: children who show more persistence, initiative, and engagement in kindergarten do better later, and the foundations start describing those habits at age three.

That is a state education department saying, in a standards document, that trying again is a skill to be taught. Not a personality. A skill.

What Book 7 does with it

Kit Tries Again opens with a crash. The invention from Book 6 collapses the moment the juice box goes in. Kit's lip wobbles. Then the twins arrive. Sam builds a tower, it crashes, and he shouts "OOPS! ALMOST!" with a gap-toothed grin. He builds again. Crashes again. "OOPS! ALMOST!" Suki, his sister, does not shout. She leans in and looks at the wreckage. By the third crash Kit is laughing, and when his own invention falls again he shouts "ALMOST!" and means it. Suki points to one spot. "Fix ONE thing." He does, and it works.

The trick is the word. "Almost" is not a consolation prize. It contains the next try. A child who has "almost" does not need to be talked out of the wobbly lip. The lip wobbles, the word comes, the hands go back to the cardboard.

Book 8 picks up the second half. Devi rolls up in her purple wheelchair, looks at the working-but-lumpy invention, and says "I see ONE thing we can fix." Fix, test, fix, test. Persisting is not the same as trying harder. It is trying one specific thing differently.

What you can do

• Play the ALMOST game. Stack cups as high as you can. When they fall, shout "ALMOST!" together and count. The number is a progress count, not a failure count.
• Borrow Suki's line. When a block tower falls, do not rebuild it. Ask "which ONE thing should we fix?" Let the child pick, even if the pick is wrong.
• Say "almost" about your own day. The cake that sank. The shelf that is crooked. Children copy the word faster than the idea.

The educator guide for Book 7 has circle-time questions and classroom activities built on the same beat. Fair warning: once a room of three-year-olds has the battle cry, they use it on everything.

Sources

• California Department of Education, California Preschool/Transitional Kindergarten Learning Foundations: Approaches to Learning (2024). Original PDF. Archived copy on littlesparksbooks.com (PDF), saved in case the original moves.
• California Department of Education, California Preschool/Transitional Kindergarten Learning Foundations overview page (nine domains). www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re/psfoundations.asp

Chris Kuczynski is an engineer turned registered patent attorney, a preschool co-founder, and a dad. He is the author of Kit's Little Sparks, a 20-book STEM series that gives children ages 2 to 4 the social and emotional foundations of the inventor's mindset. It is the first of four age-tiered series for readers ages 2 to 12.