In chatting with my fourth-grade daughter about New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals for the new year, I provided several prompts to help her think about what she wanted to do better, learn more about, remember, and improve on. In prompting her, I realized I needed to take time to reflect on these same prompts before setting goals for myself! When I told her that I wanted to be a better mom, wife, and principal, she was quick to tell me that I didn’t need to improve – I was already a grown up! This led to an awesome conversation where I got to share that as humans we are never done growing and learning and getting better and that I was definitely going to be thinking and reflecting and setting goals for improvement, too.

I think it is really important to take time to have students reflect on prompts like the ones I mentioned above to help them to think about their own lives and how they want to improve as people. I also think it is extremely important for us as adults to model this for our own personal kids and our students so they see that life is an ongoing journey of growth.

I created a simple reflection sheet that can be shared digitally or printed so students can fill out via paper and pencil. I titled it “Making My Best Year Ever” because I wanted to focus on what steps I (or the person filling it out) can take to make the goals captured on the page actually happen. Check out what I came up with below – Slide 1 is in color to share digitally with students and Slide 2 is black and white if you prefer to print.

Click here to grab YOUR OWN EDITABLE COPY of this template.

You can use this as it is or feel free to change the prompts to better reflect your students or the topics you think would most help them reflect and grow. Most importantly, though, I challenge you to take the time to reflect on each prompt YOURSELF and share some of those reflections with your students so they know that you are real person working to grow yourself in the new year, too.

A few years back, I shared a post on helping students to create a ONE WORD goal for themselves. You could use these two activities back to back, or you may find that the one word activity is better suited for your students. Check out more about having students create a ONE WORD GOAL and find the full blog post and template HERE.

Happy New Year, friends! May this be your BEST YEAR EVER!