Goal Setting in 4th Grade - Part 1 - All About Goals

One of the options for the academic skills unit I gave my 4th grade teachers was a 3-part lesson on goal setting. Another was for an "all in one" goal setting lesson. I had one teacher pick each, so lesson planning/editing I went. So much of what I was finding on goal setting in my searches for was about saving money to buy expensive things, or working hard to do something like get in the school play - not a fit for what my teachers were looking for. Or it was just a bit above my students, academically and/or developmentally.

I decided the three main components to goal setting that I wanted to include were: what are goals/why are goals important/what are types of goals, what makes a goal a "good" goal, and personal goal setting.

Here's the Part 1 PPT - below is a brief outline of it. I would share the PPT for download but it includes images and a video I don't have rights to distribute (I'm a 'google image searcher'). Should be easy enough to recreate if you wanted to though.

-Go through PPT to explore the idea of goals, the importance of goals, and the types of goals.

-After discussing academic goals:

            -Students brainstorm ideas of academic goals on white boards. Have a few share out.

-After discussing personal goals:

-Show SuperBowl dog diet/exercise commercial and discuss

            -Students do 3 rounds of snowball fight with personal goals. Discuss in a circle.

The video doesn't show in the PPT, but here it is! It was truly the best video clip I could find on this topic. I don't love that it's about weight loss, but it's funny and hits home the main points I'm trying to get across.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kjjBe481B0

*Not sure what snowball fight is? It's an activity I use in my upper grades when I need movement or I want the students' response to be anonymous (or both). For this lesson, they each are given a half sheet of paper and asked to write an example of a personal goal a 4th grader may have. Then they crumple it up, stand up, and everyone "throws their snowball" then retrieves a new one. They open it up, add another example of a goal, crumple and throw. I talk them through each tiny step in this and it prevents it from getting too rowdy. We do 3 rounds of this and then gather in a circle. Students have in front of them a piece of paper with 3 examples of personal goals a 4th grader may have, all written by different people. I'll ask things like "raise your hand if there's one on your paper about behavior", then note how many and have a couple share out. "Who has a goal on their paper about a hobby or activity?", "Who has a long-term goal about a career?", etc.

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Identifying and Ignoring Distractions Lesson Plan

Have you ever asked the teachers to tell you what they want a lesson on, and they tell you, and then you regret asking a little because you have no idea how to accomplish what they want? No? Maybe it's just me...

This year's most requested academic topic lesson is "Identifying and Ignoring Distractions". Yowza. That's a biggie. When I first was tasked with this last year, I did an exhaustive google search. While I got some great ideas for the identification side of things, I struggled to connect with finding a solid way to teach kiddos how to ignore them.

I start off the lesson with this Sesame Street short called "Focus":

I ask the students after: What was the problem the girl has? Did anyone catch any of the ways she used to solve her problem and be more focused?



And then, like the greats that came before me (Ms. Sepp and Jill Kuzma), I used Ned's Head. Students took turns pulling different kinds of distractions at school out of his head. Students used pre-learned "agree" or "disagree" hand signals to show if it's a distraction they struggle with sometimes. The grossness factor usually worked in my favor. After we've gone through them all, I ask the students to tell my why distractions are a problem and then share out (grades suffer, you get in trouble, etc.).







Then I ask them to brainstorm (either at their table group, whole group, or turn and talk) some ways to handle these distractions so we can stay focused. I project this list and we discuss any of the ones on it that they didn't mention:

I always take a minute to explain what self-talk is for the half of the class that doesn't know: "Self-talk is the stuff we tell ourselves in our minds. It's all the thoughts we have in our mind. Using self-talk can be really helpful when we are distracted to help us focus again."

They should all have experience with the other strategies by now (ignoring, taking a deep breath, moving somewhere else) so the brief reminder that they work both for conflict and for distractions is all I do. My big hope is for the students to grasp self-talk and begin using that as well, so that's the focus for our applied practice.

I used a few different strategies depending on each class' individual needs and abilities, but they all involved scripts/scenarios: situations where a student would be distracted paired with self-talk the student could use to focus. Here's a link to the scripts (both formats) in my TPT store.

Option A: I acted out about 3 of these using the teacher and some of the higher readers in the class.

Option B: I put students in small groups, gave them scripts and about 10 minutes to "prepare", and then they performed each of them for the whole group.

Option C: Each scenario was a different rotation with 4 copies of the script. Groups rotated through and at each one they chorally read the scenario and then each read the self-talk portion of the script aloud individually.

In one room I had the ability to conduct this lesson as a two-parter and had a little extra time. I had students write examples of the self-talk they can use in situations where they may get distracted. For 3rd grade ELL students, I was very impressed!

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