Setting Goals

At the beginning of each school year, our parents sit down with each of us kids to discuss the coming year.  There are two parts to this meeting - setting goals and signing an educational contract.  Neither meant a lot to me until this year.  Today I will share about goals and I hope that next week you will want to hear about the contract.

I know my mom and adult leaders plan, but the idea of goals was more than I wanted to wrap my head around until recently.  I have always been the kid who is still finishing up the year's work in July while my sister is enjoying a break because she finished her work early.  Honestly, a couple of times I've wondered if I'd get my work complete in time to attend summer camp.  Thankfully, my last-minute scrambling have always paid off and I've finished in the nick of time every time. 

This year was different.  Something clicked in the spring and I realized that if I do an extra math lesson, even every other day, then I'd at least finish on time.  Oh, was that a goal I just set?  I shocked my parents by doing lessons on the weekends and some evenings.  Before I knew it, May was here and I was at the end of the book!  To reward me for finishing so early, my mom let me take a few weeks off of math while I finished out the school year.

In the extra time that I had to think while I wasn't doing math, I realized that I could take this finishing early thing to the next level.  I calculated that I could easily finish each math level in 8 months.  What if I took a short break at the end of each level and then moved on without waiting for the next year to begin?  I could complete high school math during 10th grade and take college classes during 11th and 12th grades! 

Now that it clicked for me, I want to take a minute to share with you a couple of things about our goal-setting.  We write three goals each year: academic, behavioral/social and personal.  Each goal is written in our journal like this:

• Goal
• Why it's important
• Steps I will take to achieve it
• Help I will need
• When I plan to accomplish it

My mom made this to help us in our goals:

So what are your goals this year?