How to Help Your Students Create New Year’s Goals

If you teach grades four and above, now is a good time to help your students create New Year’s goals. Taking stock of where we are after a year ends and then creating goals for the new year upon us is a fun and inspiring activity.

Help Your Students Create New Year’s Goals

So I’m sure you are wondering how this would roll out. What type of goals should students make and how do I structure this lesson? Of course the format and structure of this (these) lesson(s) depends greatly on the grade level you teach.

Presenting this type of lesson will be very different for young children than for older teens.

Upper Elementary Students

Before I discuss Upper Elementary Students learning this lesson, let me tell you about my experience with younger children.

I have tried this lesson with first and second graders. Children these ages have a difficult time creating goals. Although you can guide them through this lesson, their goals will merely mimic the ones you use in your example.

You can try this for yourself, but I’m fairly sure you will have the same results. Knowing this, you may still want to do this lesson, and that’s fine as long as you are aware of this. But from about fourth grade on, students are able to come up with their own goals and to build upon those that you provide as an example.

My suggestion when teaching this lesson with upper elementary students is to provide about two or three generic goals in your examples/guided practice. Then when asking the students to create their own goals, tell them they can only use one that matches those you provided and they need to come up with two-three of their own also.

If they are having trouble thinking of their own different goals, you can have them work with a group or a partner and then allow them to have the same or similar goals.

If you need more information about helping elementary students with writing, I have another article about this topic that might interest you. You can read it here: How I Teach Writing in Elementary School

Middle School and High School Students

For Middle School and High School students that only have a fifty minute period, my suggestion is to use two or three class sessions for this lesson.

To begin the lesson, you need to have students review all their accomplishments from the year that just ended. You can make this be an entire class period with the students writing a short essay about their accomplishments. OR, you can use this activity as an introduction to the lesson. Even doing this shortened introduction, the lesson will probably go into a second day.

For Middle School and High School students an excellent resource to refer to when making this type of lesson plans is at Cult of Pedagogy website, the link is here: Helping Students Make New Year’s Resolutions.

An idea for the lesson format

As mentioned above, the lesson introduction begins by having students recognize what they’ve accomplished in the previous year that just ended. Next, you discuss goals and why people set goals. Then you link together the idea of a “goal” and a “New Year’s resolution.” While these are similar, it’s important to take the time to differentiate between the two (and give the similarities also).

Next you can describe types of goals that people make. Some ideas are: work, school, health, home, hobbies, sports, financial, habits, etc. Brainstorm with students a few examples with specifics (not just the topic). For example, I will practice my soccer goal kicks to get more accurate.

Depending on the age of the students, select a certain number of goals that you want the students to set for themselves. Next, set them loose to brainstorm, write an outline and rough draft and finally the paper.

Well, my teacher friends, that’s about it for this article. One of my New Year’s resolutions will be to strive to write one article a week again. I was doing so at the beginning of last year, but got behind in September.

And, don’t forget to write a few goals for yourself as well.

Until Next Time,