Personal Goals

Hi! I am looking forward to meeting up with a few more parents tonight at our Family night. What gives me a real buzz is to hear children telling their parents about what they have been doing at school and the things they have learnt to do.
Our theme this week is “Personal Goal Setting”. The two key tasks are our cone runs and our spelling. For the cone run we see how far we can run in five minutes around a track marked with cones. There are at least three children who can run further than me! We recorded what we thought we could do today based on previous runs. My final score today was 28. In order to model what goal setting means I talked to the children about how if I had worn shoes I think I could have done 29 because I limped across the stony bits and across the berries under the trees. I also talked about it was my responsibility to do what was needed to achieve my goals and asked the question of what they felt they could do to achieve the goal they had set.
As for last week in spelling we did our pretest and not only recorded our score but I also asked every child to set a goal for the test on Friday. Some children are cautious while others were overly optimistic. We talked of making goals achievable, but not too easy. On Friday they will be able to compare what they hoped to get with their final score. For some they will need to take ownership of the amount of effort they put in, while other will be able to celebrate their success of meeting or exceeding their targets. While this process is a challenge for some of the younger ones it does build the concept of being a learner and provide a clear strategy for measuring personal progress.