Summer Goals

I set goals every New Year and last year I even set Summer Motherhood Resolutions, but this year I set Summer Goals with my kids.  I feel like I have more time to help them and we can really focus on their development for a few months.

We set goals in three areas: Physical, Educational, and Practical.

I talked to each child about what was important to them, what will help them for school next year, and what they wanted their goals to be.  This is what we came up with:

ELLE:

Physical:  Get the splits down.

Educational:  Know all multiplication times tables 1-12

Practical:  Learn to make a variety of lunches.

CREW:

Physical: Ride bike for exercise

Educational:  Know all addition and subtraction facts

Practical: Learn how to tie shoes

CROFT:

Physical: Dance!

Educational: Count to 100; Write all letters uppercase and lowercase

Practical: Ride a 2-wheeler without training wheels

(Despite our earlier discussion, right now Croft is choosing to only have one goal: Hip Hop.  All she wants to do is dance.)

As we set the goals, we also talked about how we would make these goals happen.  For example, I am going to ask my yoga instructor about poses and stretches Elle can do to help with her splits. I signed both of the girls up for dance classes. Elle is going to make lunch once a week as one of her chores.   I am making a counting game for Croft and Crew and I are going to bike together.

We also added “Work on goals” to our Bored Jar.

Another idea I had to help with the educational goals is to have each child TUTOR another child.

So Elle will help Crew with his addition and subtraction facts, Crew will help Croft with counting to 100, and Croft will help Locke with his colors.  Looks like I am left to help Elle with her multiplication facts.  I am nervous to see how the tutoring goes between siblings because I know there will be fighting, but I am hoping that working together will make them push through it.  And I think it helps that everyone gets to be a tutor to someone, but they also all have to be tutored.

And lastly, I need to make sure I pad our week with sufficient time to work on these goals.

The kids and I made our own goal sheets so we could remind ourselves of the goals we set.   Some used pictures and some used words.  We will hang these up so we can see them all summer.

We’ve already started working on our goals.  Crew rode 3 miles to Grandma’s house;  Croft cranks the iPod and dances every day; and Elle mastered Top Ramen all by herself yesterday.

I like the idea of my kids learning to set goals and then working on them and I think small summer goals is a great place to start.