New Year's Resolution Videos and Penguins

I realize this post is coming a little late to help anyone with New Year's resolution lessons plans, seeing that it is already the 27th, but hey there's always next year, right!? After returning from our holiday break, my guidance lessons focused on goal setting, tying it into New Year's resolutions.

In my 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade classes we had a New Year's party where we set 3 goals.  To make the lesson more engaging and fun for students, I brought in party hats, crowns, and necklaces that I had at home from our New Year's Eve celebration. This was a great way to "re-use" my party favors.  I bought the party kit at CVS for about 5 dollars.

Once the party favors were passed out we discussed what New Year's resolutions are, and I explained that they are the same thing as setting goals.  This led into a lesson on how to set appropriate goals and make a plan for accomplishing them. I created this worksheet for each student to complete. They set 3 goals: 1 for school, 1 for friendship, and 1 for home.

To conclude the lesson, I video-tapped each student reading their goals and put the clips together into really cute class videos using Windows Movie Maker.  The students LOVED watching their video during their next guidance lesson, which also helped with the lesson by reinforcing the goals they had set the week before.  I got inspiration for doing the videos from this video on SchoolTube. After watching this clip you will have a good idea of what our videos looked like, but I didn't feel comfortable posting the actual videos online due to student privacy concerns. (It's unfortunate, because they are so cute)

With my 1st and 2nd grade classes I stuck with the New Year's party theme and also taught them how to set goals and why goals are so important in school and in the real world.  They created these cute "Penguin Resolutions Reminders" from EdHelper.