Happy New Year! (FREE PRINTABLE)

In our homeschool, the New Year is the start of a new “semester”. We transition back into our curriculum and a establish a loose schedule. After spending the previous week in reflection and gratitude, on December 31st we begin to look towards the future.

From an emotional health perspective, I don’t like to focus on “New Year, New Me”. We don’t identify things that we don’t like about ourselves, or set goals to become entirely different people. We focus on growth.

Growth of our skills.

Growth of our relationships.

Growth of our knowledge.

Growth of our dreams.

We work to set goals for the New Year, taking care not to focus on what we “don’t like about ourselves”.

We focus on what we DO like about ourselves and how we would like to build on those strengths.

This is an important distinction, especially when we are working with children.

I like to take this opportunity to model and support healthy goal setting.

As parent’s and caregivers, we make it possible for our children to reach for the stars and dream as big as they’d like.

We also want to empower them to set goals that they can achieve. This helps them feel a true sense of accomplishment.

With this in mind, we set long-term and/or dream goals and shorter-term SMART goals.

I use the worksheet below to allow my children space to make their own goals for the new year. You can download it here. This activity is self-focused, meaning the goals are entirely their own. It may be one of my homeschooling goals that my son improve his skills in Piano and Trumpet this year, but my goals should not influence this activity.

For the long-term and/or dream goals I offer no intervention.

For the SMART goals, I work with each child to discuss how they plan to achieve these goals,

During this discussion, we work to make sure the goal is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Based. This conversation should flow naturally, ask questions, and support your child’s ability to form conclusions of their own.

For example,

If my 9-year-old’s goal is to:

build a rocket ship to Mars

If this is in the dream goal category, it’s perfect.

If this is the SMART goal category, I may intervene:

“Great job making a specific, and measurable goal! Do you think you can do it THIS year?”

If he replies yes, I’ll ask him for his plan.

We may do some research on the design process and the amount of time and resources required.

We will talk about the steps towards achieving BIG goals and the need to set small ones along the way.

As we go through this process, we’ll edit the goal to become more attainable and realistic.

He may decide on a goal such as “learn to build a model rocket” or “take an engineering class”.

When supporting SMART goal setting, use caution, we do not want to squash dreams, we want to help build them up, one step at a time.

This process will look very different for each child, some may require more support in defining specific goals.

I do recommend intervention if you find that your child is focusing on things about themselves that “aren’t good enough” or need to be changed. In this case, redirect to a discussion of strengths that they would like to grow.

Note: If you find that negative thoughts are predominant in this activity, it is important to discuss these thoughts with your child and consider professional intervention to help address negative beliefs and strengthen self-concept.

My Goals

Separately, I create my own list of “homeschool goals” on the last day of the year. I review my curriculum choices from the beginning of the school year and make changes as needed. Sometimes this means abandoning a curriculum, sometimes it means reestablishing a curriculum or routine that had gotten off track. Sometimes it’s something entirely new.

This year mom’s homeschool goals are:

-Participate in the local co-op 2x a month (something new)

-Sign the 5 and 9-year-old up for Jui Jitsu. (something new)

-Teach the 5-year-old to do a cartwheel to rejoin her gymnastics peers (She stopped attending with the pandemic).

-Reestablish our weekly routine with MCT Grammar Island. (Getting back to it)

As you can see, my homeschool goals this year focus primarily on activities outside of our home. When reviewing the last year, I can see that we did not participate in programs that the kids have previously enjoyed. This year I want to make an effort to get us “back into the world” more. The last goal is related to a curriculum that I love but haven’t used in a few months. We found it really effective at the beginning of the school year and it just fell off our radar, it’s time to bring that back.

This isn’t the end of our New Year journey, check out the next post to learn how we make vision boards to start the year!