2018 New Year's Resolutions in 3rd Grade
We have an annual tradition of writing New Year’s Resolutions with our students, and adapted our ideas from the past this year to work for our 3rd graders. We enjoy this writing piece for many reasons: it often yields inspiring and hilarious responses from students (two examples pictured), it’s a great way to review our class contract and reflect as we come back from the break, it’s a quick and high success writing piece as we get used to being back at school, and of course, it’s important to model reflection and goal-setting for our students.
This year, we used the beloved Kid President video that we wrote about in our New Year’s resolution post last year with our students and their 7th grade buddies. For Writer’s Workshop with just our 3rd graders, we started by watching the New Year’s Brainpop video. It tied in nicely with our geography focus in Social Studies, and reminded students that everyone celebrates (or chooses not to celebrate) in different ways and there are many New Year’s holidays.
Next, we modeled writing a resolution by first brainstorming, introducing the vocabulary word “resolve”, and finally coming up with a plan for how to achieve our goal. We reminded students to look at our class contract for inspiration, and asked them to think about trying something new in 2018. We gave students a graphic organizer with space for brainstorming, and then had them elaborate on two of their ideas by explaining them in detail and then going through the steps of a plan to make them happen.
Two of our favorites are pictured, but we also loved hearing about students trying to be kinder to their family members by giving more compliments, being a better bookworm by making time to read more and try different genres of books, being more patient by remembering that everyone is different and that’s okay, and so much more.
"How do you like me NOW, parents?"
Do you have any New Year’s resolutions this year? How do you get back into the swing of things in January? Do you have your students do any goal setting or resolution writing for the New Year? We’d love to hear from you!