Rewards To Encourage Goal Setting

Goal setting with elementary students is so important! Celebrating meeting those goals is just as important too. These activities for students to celebrate their success are meaningful, fun, and engaging. Reward coupons, reward tags, goal badges, goal crowns, and more! There's also a large poster that makes for a great bulletin board. Students loves these rewards for their goal setting for the new year or back to school.

How to celebrate your students when they meet a goal

Using rewards to encourage goal setting in your classroom is a great motivator for students. Including celebrations and rewards for your students when they meet a goal is a huge motivator in their success. It depends on the student on how you should celebrate your students. Some students will be fine with the intrinsic reward, knowing that they met their goal. Other students will want an extrinsic reward, to be celebrated for meeting their goal. I love to celebrate my students when they’ve worked so hard to achieve this goal that they set weeks prior. You can check out another blog post I have about this here.

The Goal Setting Process

There are many different important steps in the goal setting process:

Find the need. Students ask themselves, “What do I want to work on?”
Set the goal by defining the time frame and the goal. It’s important to know how long you have to meet a goal.
Determine how to meet the goal. Students should be thinking, “What can I do every day to make sure I meet my goal?”
Track the goal. Students need to be tracking what they are doing every day to meet their goal.
Meet the goal!
Celebrate the goal! It feels good to meet a goal!

Do you ever forget a step? I am embarrassed to admit that I used to always forget the most important part- to celebrate student success. Forgetting this important step is unfortunate because it’s probably the most important step in the entire process.

The Importance of Celebrating Success

It’s important to recognize everything our students are doing to meet their goal. Acknowledging everything your students are doing to reach their goal is just as important as actually meeting the goal. It’s important to encourage and celebrate your students along the way. You may have one student who set a goal to master their sight word list by the end of the quarter. Maybe that student isn’t going to meet that goal, but acknowledging everything they have done along the way is important. Maybe they’ve been reading 30 minutes a night compared to the 10 minutes they were doing before. That is success.

Celebration Central

I had a bulletin board in my classroom dedicated to our classroom goals. At the bottom (within student reach), was our Celebration Central. In Celebration Central, students were able to sign the large “Celebrating Our Goals” poster and pick a coupon card from our large tin once they met their goal. They could use their coupon on any Friday. I chose Fridays because Fridays are always a little hectic so adding in a coupon wouldn’t really change the dynamic of the day 😉 Some of the coupons are: pajama day, bring a stuffed animal, use the teacher’s chair, etc. There are many different options for them to pick from. I loved using these rewards to encourage goal setting because my kids loved them.

Goal setting with elementary students is so important! Using rewards to encourage goal setting is a great way for students to feel motivated to work toward and meet their goals. Celebrating meeting those goals is just as important too. These activities for students to celebrate their success are meaningful, fun, and engaging. Reward coupons, reward tags, goal badges, goal crowns, and more! There's also a large poster that makes for a great bulletin board. Students loves these rewards for their goal setting for the new year or back to school.

Reward Tags To Celebrate

Another way to celebrate my students’ meeting their goals is through reward tags. Once a student meets a goal, they get the corresponding reward tag and then they glue it onto the data binder sheet in their data binder. That way, students can showcase their goal brag tags in their data binder. There are different reward tags for sight word goals, reading goals, math goals, etc.

Goal Student Badges

Students can also wear “I Met My Goal!” badges to show everyone that they met a goal. Or, when we set goals and have been working on conversing with others about them, students can wear the “Ask Me About My Goal!” badges! This gives others the opportunity to see that they are working really hard on a goal and would love to talk about it. By talking about their goal, they are building their confidence and hopefully feeling really encouraged to keep working hard.

Goal Crowns

Using rewards to encourage goal setting is a great way for students to feel motivated to work toward and meet their goals. Some celebrations include coupons, crowns, badges, and more!

Another way to showcase our goal achievement is with a crown. My students always loved wearing a crown! Who doesn’t?

See It Here

If you would like to begin using rewards to encourage goal setting in your classroom, click the picture below or click here.

Goal Setting With Primary Students Email Series

If you would like to join the email series, “Goal Setting With Primary Students”, sign up below! It’s a 5 day series complete with short lessons and freebies to help you successfully set actionable and manageable goals with your students. Don’t miss out!