New Year's Resolution Time Capsules
Refresh Your Students' Goals With A New Beginning
- Grades: 1–2, 3–5, 6–8
When students come back from break, it can be difficult to get them refocused after the excitement of the holidays. In some ways, I treat January as a new beginning. My students and I reflect on what we have accomplished so far in the school year and make plans for the rest of our year together.
Part of our plan includes the students making resolutions. I start my lesson by asking students, “What is a Resolution?” They soon learn that a resolution is a promise that you make to yourself. I then read aloud some of the resolutions made by my students in previous years. This gives my current students some specific ideas about making resolutions. I follow this up with a discussion about how there are different kinds of resolutions.
Students finally complete a worksheet that I created. It asks them to make two PERSONAL resolutions, two resolutions that involve FAMILY OR FRIENDS, and two resolutions that involve SCHOOL. Students share their top two resolutions with the class before we put them in our “Resolution Time Capsule.” I decorate a shoebox with New Year’s Eve decorations and have each student ceremoniously place their resolutions into the box. I explain to the students that we will not open the box until the end of the year to see if we have accomplished our goals. When the end of the year comes around, students are given their resolutions from the box and are asked to write a reflective piece of writing about how far they have come or what things they might still need to work on. This is the final piece of writing that is placed in their third grade portfolio.
In other years, I have had students use Print Shop in our computer lab to create posters on which they type their resolutions. This is nice because the final posters can be used to create a bulletin board in your classroom where students are reminded of their resolutions everyday.
|Students can make their resolutions into a poster.|