Chasing Rainbows: Discovering Your Dreams, A Journey through Goals, Grit, and Growth by Sowtastic, LLC
Review by Angie Carlson
When this book landed on my desk, I expected to read a standard picture book with 32 pages and 500 words, urging kids to dream big and never give up – a relevant, helpful message, nonetheless. Chasing Rainbows: Discovering Your Dreams, A Journey through Goals, Grit, and Growth is so much more.
Chasing Rainbows is a learn-and-apply guidebook designed to teach kids how they can achieve incremental success along the journey of reaching their dreams via setting goals, creating a plan, and exercising resilience through challenges. Illustrated through the storytelling of five whimsical characters on different and individual paths, the authors show how applying their framework can work for everyone.
Chasing Rainbows is more than a children’s story, it’s a resource to be utilized and recommended for ages 10-14. Educators can certainly implement the concepts in this book in class as performance motivators, while librarians might host a workshop in their program line-up, offering copies of the book for kids in attendance. Either way, the book will be best understood and applied with the guidance of a grown-up facilitating each piece of the framework.
The sponsoring author of this book is an organization named Sowtastic, which offers a wealth of resources on their website to teach kids how to build emotional intelligence around goals and money, enact smarter spending habits, and practice these intentions with mini-courses and online games.
“In a digitally connected, social world, our seemingly small financial choices and decisions can have long-lasting, dynamic consequences,” Sowtastic explains. As it applies to goal setting, without teaching kids how to get started, we leave them stranded alone on an island with their big ideas.
Chasing Rainbows explains the process of identifying what you want, considering its achievability in the short term, and then setting the goals necessary to reach it. Big dreams like being in the NBA are great but unattainable in middle school. An achievable goal would be making the school basketball team with persistent, daily practice.
Utilizing the SMARTER goals method (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound, evaluated, and revised), kids can write each step directly in the built-in workbook pages of Chasing Rainbows, memorializing their first goal-setting experience for parents to save with their other childhood keepsakes.
Helping children understand what motivates them increases awareness of the impact of their decisions, promotes a healthier mindset, and boosts overall confidence and accountability. Not being a traditional picture book is Chasing Rainbows’ greatest feature, as it teaches an important and necessary framework that will set kids up for success as they grow.