Setting Weekly Goals with Kids

On Sunday nights Jared and I have a standing date to review the upcoming week’s calendar. Then I plan our school lessons, meal plan, and map out my goals and “to dos” for the week. Preparing for the week helps me be more intentional about where I put my time and makes the week go much smoother.

I thought a similar conversation with the kids might be a good way to help them start to learn to plan ahead and begin to work on achieving their vision board goals.  (It sounds a lot more formal than it really is–keep in mind that my kids are seven and under.)

Here’s how it works for us:

1. Review Goals

During our weekly chat we start by reviewing the goals on their vision boards. We talk about the goals–dream about them, laugh about them.

When creating the vision boards, we let them “brain dump” (brainstorm) and let any idea be a good one. And although it’s tempting (and probably my instinct reaction), I try not to be “dream crusher.”

Because I find during this review stage the kids naturally discover the practicality of a dream as we break it into pieces and talk about the steps/supplies needed in order to accomplish it.

{Vision Boards}

2. Break into Baby Steps

Breaking a big goal into baby steps helps the goal become more manageable.

Emery (5) is determined to add to her My Little Pony collection, but Christmas is over and her birthday is several months away so receiving her coveted mare as a gift is less likely. But we do allow the kids to earn money for extra chores (beyond their daily chores), so she’s set a weekly goal to do some extra chores to earn money toward a toy purchase.

3. Write them down

After talking about a few of the baby steps they’d like to accomplish during the week, I sneak in a bit of writing (always up for more opportunities to get them writing!) and have them write down four things they’d like to work on using this {free} weekly planning sheet.

4. Evaluate

During the next Sunday planning session we review their previous week’s goals. Sometimes they’ve achieved, other times we revise the plan. But the ultimate goal here is not for them to reach amazing heights, just to practice setting a goal, breaking it into bite-size pieces, and working toward it. I’m a firm believer in Zig Ziglar:

If you aim for nothing, you’ll hit it every time.