How We Set Goals With Our Preschooler
We do a weekly planning session to help us make plans to achieve the goals we set in our yearly planning session. More about that here. We usually do our weekly planning on Sunday afternoons after church while the baby is napping. Oak usually sticks around for a few minutes, then gets bored, and walks away. Then all week, he asks us to do things that aren’t in the plan. It seemed like it was time to get him more involved in setting goals and planning for the week.
Materials We Used
Large Blocks or Rocks or Paper Stones
Paper
Crayons or Colored Pencils or Markers
Picture of Heavenly Father (optional)
Picture of Earth (optional)
Discussing the Why
We started by talking about how he is a child of God and lived with God before we came to Earth. We pretended that dad was God (we could have had him hold a picture of Heavenly Father) and Oak went and stood by him and then when he came to earth he came and sat by me (I could have held a picture of Earth). Now that he’s on Earth, he’s not with Heavenly Father. But he is trying to get back to him! Jesus showed us how to find joy and improve ourselves on the path back:
As we increase intellectually (wisdom), physically (stature), spiritually (favor with God), and socially (favor with man), and make covenants it’s bringing us closer to Heavenly Father.
We had Oak build a path out of large wooden blocks back to Nate. You could also use paper or rocks to make the path.
Setting the Goals
Then we went through each category. For each category, I wrote the category name on the paper and had Oak color it. Then we talked about what the category means. and wrote down things that he is already doing well in that category. We asked him to choose one new thing that he wants to learn or try. Or one thing that he is already doing that he wants to improve. Sometimes we had to throw out a few suggestions to get the creative juices flowing. When he chose his goal, we wrote it down and circled it. We did this for each category. You could hang this up on the fridge or mirror when you are done. We wrote ours in Oak’s journal.
Following Up
Now, I feel like the most important part of this is to make sure they actually accomplish some of the goals so that they can feel that good feeling that comes from accomplishing goals! And at this age, they are relying on YOUR support to make that happen. Our support for daily and. weekly goals looked different. Oak’s physical goal was to drink a glass of water every day first thing in the morning. So, after a few days of reminding him and forgetting, we brainstormed some things we could do to help him remember. We ended up putting a note on the fridge so that we would see it when we went to make breakfast. Later we revised the goal to be both Mom and Oak drink a glass of water in the morning so we could help each other.
For his weekly goals, we had a mini follow-up session halfway through the week where we made sure we had either accomplished his weekly goals or had plans to accomplish them before the end of the week.
We now start our weekly planning session discussing with Oak how he felt like his goals went, whether he wants to change any of them for the next week, and making plans for how he will accomplish those goals this week. It has engaged him in the rest of the planning session and he feels like he is more in control of his week.
