Learning Goals for the New Year
Help your students select and write a learning goal for this month or year.
They can color or paint a penguin and then write their goal to display with the class.
You may like to first talk with your children about perseverance, persistence and working towards goals. Share a story and talk about how the character set a goal and worked towards it.
Here are some of my favorites:
- The Koala Who Could
- Jabari Jumps
- The Curious Garden
- Evonne Goolagong
- How to Catch a Star
- The Little Engine That Could
- The Very Busy Spider
Follow your reading with a short, collaborative minimal-prep game:
Penguin Puzzle
- tell the class you are challenging them to complete a puzzle (if you have a penguin one that would be perfect)
- put a simple jigsaw puzzle in the center of your seated circle of students
- choose one child to be the penguin
- penguin goes to the puzzle and finds as many pieces as possible to add to the puzzle
- the rest of the class counts to 10/20/50 (change this number to match the complexity of your puzzle and age of students)
- if you have a set of fish counters, drop them into a bucket as they count, reminding them to listen for the sounds (this can be fish jumping from the cold water up onto the iceberg where penguin is playing the puzzle)
- once the class finished counting the penguin runs around the circle of students and chooses a new penguin
- play starts again
- once completed, discuss how the puzzle was completed one piece at a time and how everyone helped etc
I hope your little learners have fun setting goals this year and making their penguin!