Goal Setting for the New School Year

My daughter just started eighth grade, and as kids get older, I think it’s important to talk about their goals for the year in terms of learning, friendships, hobbies and more.

This can be done informally at home, or in the classroom. Having goals encourages kids to think in terms of a growth mindset, understanding that they might not be great at a particular skill from the beginning, but with practice they can improve.

The Thinker Builder has a great goals writing activity that kids can use on their own or in the classroom to outline their goals for the school year (or the new year if you want to do this in December or January as well).

It outlines a writing prompt based on an acronym for goals: the guts of the goal, obstacles standing in their way, action steps and looking ahead.

The guts of the goal means a goal statement and noting what success looks like and the time frame involved. Looking ahead is about how they will feel about reaching the goal and what they will do next.

In addition to the worksheet, there’s a whole set of goal setting materials on their Teachers Pay Teachers page, including a goal planning booklet for kids to use to help them set good goals, a 3D block-shaped presentation version (as well as 2D and bulletin board options).

There are also materials to help the students keep each other accountable (in pairs or small groups) to working on their goals. This would be a great way to get kids thinking about goals they can accomplish thorough the year and keeping it on their mind by doing a regular check in with each other (as an adult I could totally use that, too!).

The full collection is 36 pages and it can be used with kids in third through eighth grades.

[Photo: The Thinker Builder]

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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