The time after the long holiday break is always a great time to “restart”, review expectations, and start fresh and new. On this post, I want to share a free printable and digital New Year’s resolution activity that you can use with your 4th and 5th graders. This is a great way to connect the new year with your classroom expectations and goals.
About the New Year’s Resolution Activity
After the holiday break, we always spend some time that first day back discussing the new year and resolutions. We talk about different examples of resolutions that people in our lives may have or other common resolutions people make. We talk about the connection between resolutions and the new year, and why so many people choose to make these resolutions during this time.
To help with this discussion, I use a quick and simple non-fiction text (which is available in the free download). It gives some background to the students about what resolutions are, the tradition of resolutions, and how they are connected with the new year. It also goes over a few common resolutions that people make.
Next, we brainstorm together as a class the different resolutions that we can make. I like to do this in three categories:
- resolutions that we can make at school
- resolutions that we can make with our family or at home
- resolutions that we can make with our friends.
We brainstorm a list of possible resolutions together as a class. The students then choose (or come up with a new resolution) one from each category that they want to resolve to be better at or something to resolve to do less of.
I do like to also do a class resolution. To do this, we discuss possible resolutions and then decide on our class resolution. I post the class resolution where we can check in every now and then to make sure that we are making progress towards our resolution and accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish.
This is also a great time for students to quickly reflect and revisit on their own personal resolutions and whether they are making progress towards those. Because as we know, sometimes resolutions are easily made and just as easily forgotten. Revisiting a class resolution every now and then brings that back and makes it a little bit more meaningful for the students.
Download the FREE New Year’s Resolution Activity Here
Need help assigning the digital version through Google Classroom? Click here!
Want More Digital New Years Reading Activities?
Do you want more digital New Years activities to engage your students + review reading comprehension skills? This New Year-themed reading comprehension resource is perfect to review key 4th and 5th grade reading skills and engage your students this winter. It includes engaging topics such as New Year superstitions, New Year traditions, and more!
Again, thank you! Do you have anything on non-fiction reading or writing or perhaps biography writing?
Happy New Year!
JoAnn Kelly
Thank you for your generous sharing. I’m a first time classroom teacher (involuntarily moved to the classroom after 15 years as a school librarian) and your blog has given me great inspiration and ideas.
I also wanted to say that I appreciate the clean lines and lack of cutesy images in your documents.
Happy New Year!