Shooting for the STARS – Literacy Goal Board

Every student needs goals to work towards and this is very important in Literacy instruction. I have used a variety of different goal boards for my Literacy Time and loved them. I saw even my most struggling students embrace these goals and work towards them. I watched each student’s awareness of their strengths and weaknesses as a reader grow. Now, this didn’t happen by accident or the nature of my students just being goal-oriented kids. These goals were a focus for the students. It shaped what they did in literacy every day. It was on our walls, it was what they wrote about each week in their journals, and it was what guided my teaching. We had both class goals and personal goals. Inspired by my reading of the daily CAFE® and the Daily 5® from The Sisters I immediately implemented them into my classroom. I worked with them last year and partway through the year added to my CAFE board and changed it into a Craft board based on LadyBug’s Teacher Files post here. I loved them both. However this summer I was thinking about my practice and felt that I had some needs in this area

I needed something more aligned with the curriculum I was using
I needed something that could also be portable for the kids and visual for all
I needed goals for Writing as well as reading
I needed to integrate my learning goals and success criteria.
I needed more of a direct link to my Bump It Up Wall and my TLCP (teaching and Learning Critical Pathways)

So with all this in mind, I put these together and came up with this…”Shooting for the STARS”

This is a board that integrates both reading and writing goals onto one board. In reality, I didn’t have space in my room for two separate boards so I put them together.

S- Making Sense of Reading

T – Thinking about Reading and Writing

A – Accuracy and Fluency

R – Form and Style in Writing

S- Steps in the Writing Process

Students can have one reading and one writing goal that they will work on during their literacy centers. The goals will be identified on this board for each student to work on. This will hopefully help me to focus both on Reading and Writing equally. I found that my reading and writing programs were out of balance last year especially in the area of creative writing. Additionally, each goal aligns with the Ontario Curriculum however in my research on writing the language for the goals I looked towards the Common Core Standards as the language of these standards are more student-friendly than the curriculum in Ontario. Therefore my learning goals are Ontario-based but also align with most Common Core Standards for Language Arts.

My second concern was that I gave them a goal last year but many would forget the steps they would need to take to accomplish this goal. Hints, Tips, and Success criteria are imperative for students to really understand the goal and work towards accomplishing this. I however didn’t have room to place success criteria with each goal on the bulletin board. My solution…index cards, or at least an index card size take away for the student after we conference. Even better these will fit in recipe boxes that you can buy at the dollar store or any photo book out there. Plus students can use them as bookmarks or glue them in their notebooks for safekeeping or use them as a conference reference card. So for each goal on my board, I have a reference card that includes both the learning goal and the success criteria.

I am teaching a 4/5 this fall and these are based on what I will be using for the upcoming year. That being said these would also work for grades 3-6, especially for the learning goals. The success criteria may change slightly for grades three and six however as a teacher the complexity in which we expect and the forms in which the students are writing are outlined in the curriculum.

If these are popular and the demand I will make them for other grade levels however at this point I have created these for my use and thought that many of you would also find these helpful. If you would like them for other grades let me know and I can work on these for you. Leave a comment here or on my TPT store.

Here is the goal menu for you to check out for free along with the headers.