Goal Setting in Third Grade

We have had a very exciting start to our year in third grade with Classroom Champions!  From the moment the kids saw the Olympic rings on our bulletin board, they were eager to figure out our mentor.  We played an ongoing round of "guess who" during the first week of school, finally revealing that our mentor is Alex Rigsby.  Here is my class posing for Alex:

In the second week of school, we leaped into goal setting.  This is part of the third grade curriculum at my school, Bren Mar Park, so I have taught it before.  Having the awesome platform of Classroom Champions to teach it through made it even better!  We started out by watching Alex's video about goal setting.  The kids were energized after hearing about Alex's goal, and wanted to start on their own right away to meet her challenge of setting one long-term goal and three short-term goals.  To get us in the right mindset for setting goals, we brainstormed our strengths and challenges, then talked about them with a partner.  In the next lesson, we picked one of our challenges to turn into a goal.  The kids filled out a smart goal think sheet about their potential goal to help them fully think it through.  

We learned all about SMART goals in order to complete this sheet.  We used the following acronym:

S - Specific
M - Measurable
A - Attainable
R - Realistic
T - Timely

After filling out the think sheets, students met in pairs and then small groups to discuss their goals.  They used their friends' suggestions to make their goals even better.  At this point, we were finally ready to write our goals!  As many of my students speak English as a second language, we used sentence stems to help us officially write our goals.  We didn't fill out the second half of the goal sheet because we were saving our action plans for later.

 

Then, we got to the fun part.  We made a hockey goal (#TeamAlex) and wrote our goals on hockey pucks.  Now, every time we walk past the goal in the hallway, we imagine that we are scoring goals with the goals that we set.  We can do it!

We had now met the first part of Alex's challenge - every student had set a long-term goal for themselves - but they still needed to set three short-term goals to help them meet that long-term goal.  I explained this to the kids as creating an action plan to meet their goal.  Before we made action plans for ourselves, we practiced making them with partners.  Every pair received an example goal.  They had to work together to think of three steps to take to meet that goal.  Then, we shared all of our action plans as a class.

 

 Finally, we created action plans for our own goals.  Each student thought of three short-term goals that enabled them to meet their long-term goal.  The last step was that students took their goals home to share with their families.  Overall, this was a purposeful, fun-filled month.  We learned a lot about each other and developed the skill of goal-setting, which we will continue to use all year.  We are excited for the rest of the year with Classroom Champions!