Goal Setting Craft for Elementary Students

This Goal Setting Craft helps students express the goals they have set for themselves in an artful, creative way, creating a beautiful bulletin board display for your classroom and a great keepsake for parents.  Setting goals is an important skill for students to practice all year long.

This goal-setting bulletin board resource includes many goal-setting template options, allowing teachers to differentiate them to meet the needs of their learners. Teachers can choose sentence frames and formats to motivate their students and the classroom.  

This goal-setting bulletin board craft fits right in with my other SMART Goal Setting resources. It makes a great classroom bulletin board decoration and parent communication tool!

If you would like more information about SMART Goal Setting in the classroom, you can see this blog post about Student Goal Setting in Elementary School or for an even deeper focus, the post explains the Goal Setting & Data Portfolios.

Main Components of the Goal Setting Craft

The main pages of the goal-setting bulletin board craft consist of three circles and a center circle with an arrow attached (four pages pictured below).  The arrow holds the Goal Setting Craftivity together via the glue areas on each circle.

The outer circle and the first inner circle are for school goals.  The next circle is a personal goal, and the center circle with an arrow holds it all together and includes the student’s name.

Each section offers various options. You can reuse this craftivity several times throughout the year simply by changing the sentence frames in the circles.

Start with easier sentences at the beginning of the year and progress to more difficult goal-setting concepts, such as setting a timeframe and a measurable outcome.

Variations of the Goal Setting Craftivity

The craftivity comes with a variety of options.  Included in the outer school goal circle are 28 different variations to choose from.  The second school goal circle comes with 12 options, the personal goal has 11 options, and the center circle with an arrow has 36 options, including a blank circle, words, or a variety of images of children.

Here are some of the goal-setting examples for the outer circle.  You can scaffold learning throughout the year by moving from drawing to cut-and-paste to writing goals.  The written goals also vary from describing specific steps to sharing what a student is good at and what he wants to work on.

The variations include writing one or two goals, drawing a goal, or using differentiated sentence frames to scaffold writing.  There are plenty of variations to meet the needs of all learners in your classroom.  

If you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can also make your own!  Included are blank versions where each teacher can even write in the language they want students to use.

Also included is a cut-and-paste version where students are given a set of goals and action steps.  I have included samples in the PDF as well as an editable PowerPoint file where teachers can add in their own goals for students.

For instance, if you want all students to work on math goals, but they may be working on a variety of goals, type in the goals and the action steps they could take in your classroom.  Print out just the math goals and have students choose their goal and action step.  

If you keep the file from year to year, you can repeat the craft at different times, including the beginning of the school year, the new year, or the end of the year. This goal-setting craft makes a great growth mindset activity, too! Students are to choose a different goal and action step as they make progress and accomplish their goals.

How to Create the Goal-Setting Craftivity

In general, the teacher would choose one circle from each layer and have students fill out the goal, color, and cut out the circles and glue them together.

Since this craftivity is all about goal setting, start with a whole-class goal-setting discussion before students work independently.  You can see this blog post about how I help students Set Goals in Elementary School, or this post on goal setting in the moment, which helps students align a goal with an action step.

In my second-grade classroom, we do a lot of whole-group discussions about setting goals.  We start the year with behavior goals and gradually move on to academic goals, beginning with math because it’s generally more tangible for my younger students.

One of the key connections where I find students need a lot of work is matching a goal with an appropriate action step.  So often, students set a goal and say they want to accomplish something.  However, to really set a SMART Goal, one needs to create an action plan.  I simplify this for students by having them choose one action step from a class brainstorm of many options.

This blog post outlines how we set math goals using an arrow to discuss all of the possible action steps students can take in our classroom.

Students or the teacher can choose multiple circles for one layer if they like. When assembling, simply glue them together within the same layer using the glue area as a guide to align the pieces.

To Assemble the Craftivity

To assemble the Goal Setting Bulletin Board Craft, layer the circles on top of each other so they fit neatly inside one another, from largest to smallest.  Line up the glue areas so they meet on the sides.  Place a small amount of glue in the glue areas.

Gently place the arrow on top of the circles so that the center circle is centered and the arrow covers the glue areas. Press the arrow to spread the glue a bit and let the goal-setting craftivity dry.

If students choose multiple circles for each section, place the circles on top of each other and glue them together before aligning the sections and gluing the arrow.

How to Purchase the Goal Setting Craftivity

You can purchase the Goal Setting Craftivity on my website or on Teachers Pay Teachers.

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Would you like some FREE Goal Setting forms to use with your students?