To My Educator Friends:

​

Thank you in advance for taking the time to try out this project with one of your students in need! 

​

I’ll explain the HappyDice story by way of background, and I’ll attempt to keep it brief. : )

​

After working in the fundraising and marketing world for 10 years, I found myself feeling pretty empty and unfulfilled. With the encouragement of my Dad (a retired special education administrator) and sister (an integrated preschool teacher), I walked away from the corporate world and entered the life of public education. 

​

After my first year in a Title 1 Tutor position, my biggest takeaway was not that my students couldn’t read – it was that they weren’t happy. So many of my sweet 2nd grade students came to my reading group everyday with heavy hearts from dealing with loss of parents, hard home lives, poverty, and much more that their small shoulders were bearing. Not knowing how to help them, I felt heavy myself.

​

I began to reflect on my own life. After the sudden loss of my beloved mother a few years ago, I plunged into darkness. For the sake of family and friends, I knew I had to find a way to march forward through the grief and find the light again. On a scrap piece of paper, I wrote myself a list called “Things to do when I feel deeply sad” and I hung it front and center on my fridge. My list contained very simple tasks such as, “make a cup of tea,” “pet my cat,” and “go for a walk outside.”  

​

When I felt myself slipping into the darkness, I would pull myself off of the couch, choose one thing from the list, and do it. As time passed, my list grew. I renamed it as my “Happy List", a trailing list of ways to choose happiness; a hard but necessary thing to do in the face of grief. 

And one day, it hit me that something similar might work for my struggling students. 

​

At the start of one of our reading groups, I asked my students to make a list of things that made them happy. We practiced telling stories, using imagery, writing, and sounding out words. I had them write down their “Happy Lists” slowly, and I watched as some of their little frowns turned to smiles. I took an old pair of math dice, wrote their Happy List items on small pieces of masking tape, and stuck them each side. When they came to me for reading group feeling sad, we said together, “Okay, let’s roll our happy dice!” 

​

And so HappyDice was born. A merging of two worlds: adults and children, grief and survival, hardship and peace, sadness and happiness. I myself learned that even (and especially!) in the face of hard times, we can choose to be happy. And this is what I taught my group of littles in front of me.

​

One day, I had a breakthrough with one of my students. He told me that he was feeling sad in class and that he rolled his happy dice and it landed on “my dog.” Just as we had practiced, he closed his eyes and thought of his dog – and it helped him feel happy again. My dad, now retired from education and working a few hours a week in his best friend’s wood shop, said he would make me some real dice. 

​

What came of this was 75 sets of beautiful, handmade with love, wooden dice for all my students to learn to “roll their HappyDice.” 

​

I ended the year with each of my students having their own decorated treasure box of HappyDice, filled with love and a tool for them to take home over the summer. 

My heart and theirs felt full. 

​

So, here I am with an idea that I hope you will roll out with me! I would love to see if this concept will work with other teachers and struggling students. 

​

All the materials are included in this box! To test this out: 

• Start with one struggling student. 

• Set aside 1:1 time with them to brainstorm their “Happy List”. (About 20 minutes)

• Create their list and write it on the included sticky dots.

• Remind them to put love and happiness into their boxes. (With my students, we closed our eyes and passed the box around as we all put our “Happy” into it) 

• Have the student decorate the box with images that make them happy.

• Model all steps of the activity with them. 

• Use the HappyDice as a tool for the students to refer back to when they are feeling down. 

• Reinforce the project by saying things like, “Did you roll your HappyDice today?”

• Let the students take their HappyDice home! Encourage parents to get involved, too. 

• Have fun with it! :)

​

If this works, PLEASE let me know! Take pictures or a video (without student’s faces) and please share it with me if it's a success! The key to my students was reminding them that they could roll their dice whenever, wherever they needed to cheer up. 

​

I hope together we can help more kids practice the power of choosing their happiness. 

​

Thank you from one educator to another, for your time, patience and love you put into your job everyday. You are doing miracle work! 

​

With love and appreciation, 
Lillian Bicchieri
Founder of HappyDice 

​

👀Find me at thehappydice.com 
💌Contact me at thehappydice@gmail.com