Working Towards our Goals

Being a Goal Setter has been our Learner Attribute focus this term and you can see in previous posts that we set goals around our Art Celebration--these goals included things like being brave on stage, practising and learning our moves and concentrating at practise time.  

Goal Setting and being aware of our goals fall under the Positive Engagement and Positive Accomplishment domains of the Positive Education Model.  If we are aware of what we want to improve on and we track our learning, we are more engaged and therefor are able to see achievement and if we work from areas of strength and interest we are able to get into the flow of learning, which also leads to accomplishment and engagement. 

We have a goal setting meeting close to the time we start school where we look at goals from a strengths perspective.  We identify things we can already do and a few things we can't quite do YET.  

Then we get to work on learning by continually practising our goals.  

One area that we are all working on is our writing.  Writing is very complex and has many parts, so we start small and work our way through it.  

One of the first steps in learning our letters and sounds.  Each week we practise this in different ways and then on a Friday we check in on our letters in our rocket.  We celebrate all our hard work and effort. Eventually once we know all of our letters and sounds we start to learn words. 

In order to be able to write words we have to be able to hear the sounds in them, identify which letter makes that sound and remember how to write that letter.  So throughout our day we practise these skills in different ways. 

We are playing a game where we pick a card, stretch out the sounds, find the letters and then draw and write the word.  This practise helps us when we are trying to write our own words. 

We also use a goal card to remind us what we need to do in writing.  We practise writing letters that are formed similarly and we practise using objects to help us stretch out sounds and write the words.  

Part of being a goal setter is knowing what our goal is and being able to share this with other people and talk about what our challenges are.  Last week we had whanau group time where we shared a piece of writing with our whanau group buddies.

We use these prompts to have our learning conversations:

I Am a Goal Setter Buddy Reflection

What were you learning to do? What was your goal

What was a challenge for you?

What will you do next with your learning?

Next week you will be coming in to walk through a learning scavenger hunt with your children and some will be having Student Led Conferences where we reflect on our goals we set at our start of school Goal Setting Meetings.  Help us by asking us the goal setting questions so we can explain what it is we are learning to do!