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 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.

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.

*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.