Kicking off the New Year! ***Setting Goals with your Students***
It was my first day back at school after having a full two weeks off for the holiday break. It was great seeing all the smiling faces as the students entered our classroom. I am sure going to miss the carefree days at home with my family, but it feels good to be back. Now it is time to get back to reality. I feel refreshed and ready to tackle the new year with my students.
The second half of the year with kinders can be exciting as the student's skills really start to take off. Students love showing off their reading skills as they conquer simple text in books all by themselves. As weeks go by, students become more fluent and have a great sense of pride. The kiddos begin to write sentences about a given topic using inventive spelling and their knowledge of the high frequency words introduced. Students are learning many strategies to solve math problems and are beginning to write number sentences to go along with number stories. Keeping all this in mind, during my winter break I did work on creating and updating a few products to continue to strive forward and build upon these skills to enhance student learning. If you are interested you may want to check out my teacher store to see my latest creations.
This is the perfect time of the year for students to start thinking about their own learning and what it is that they need to improve upon. Kinders do need some guidance with this as they start composing goals. They may not have the language skills to put together their ideas on their own. Begin by discussing with students some of the things that they feel that they are really good at and some of the things that they find challenging.
Students need to know that setting goals without a plan is only a dream. They need to be thinking about how they plan on attaining their goals. What types of skills do they need to practice to reach their goal and if they get stuck how can they seek out help?
Teaching youngsters to learn how to set goals is an important lifelong skill that is sure to bring your students some success. You can check out the charts I prepared for the students so they will be able to set goals and track their success.
You will receive charts for the months of September through June to track letter naming, letter naming for upper and lowercase letters, letter sounds, counting objects, writing numbers up to 20 or 30, and high frequency words. You will also receive Goal Met cards to laminate and attach to lanyards so students can proudly let your whole school know that they reached their goal and can ask about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment