Hello Everyone,

I hope that this blog post finds you all well and ready to start a brand new year on a positive note! I know that our world is rocky at times, but it’s important that we continue to think that we have a bright future regardless.

This is especially true for our students and children. They are looking at us to see if we’ve lost the light in our eyes or if we’re going to keep that light bright. One of the ways in which we can help them to keep a positive outlook is by talking to them about their New Year’s Resolution plans. What kind of ideas do they have about how to make their lives more positive this year? What goals would they like to achieve? What kind of good are they willing to do to make our planet a more loving place to live on?

Kids are great at these kind of discussions and, more often than not, they are able to bring the conversation into a direction that you might not have anticipated yourself – and that’s a GREAT thing, because we are teachers, not Kings or Saints or what have you… We are human beings with our own strengths and weaknesses and I think that it’s only POSITIVE when we are led by our students. This keeps us up to date on how our youth really feel and that’s an important piece of information to keep fresh.

Today I am sharing a set of worksheets from twinkl.com and picklebums.com. The Twinkl site was great because it provided me with a great flap activity that gets our students answering simple questions pertaining to their resolutions. I like the sheets that I picked because you can use them as a book or you can keep them flat and use the blank side to draw in an image. I decided to apply self portraits to our blank side and this is especially great for the classroom as you students will be able to guess who the resolutions belong to by both reading and looking at the portrait.

Another tip would be to make these a little smaller (if you do not have that much wall space) so that you could leave them up for the remainder of the year. That way you could remind your students to check on their resolutions from time to time, to make sure that they are still working towards them.

Along with this blog post please feel free to view our New Year’s Resolution video where I talk to Gobo about how we spent the holidays and what resolutions are. We then continue on to answer the questions on the worksheet together before showing you some of our filming bloopers.

It is my hope that you can use my videos as a guide in your classroom or as a fun video to watch at home with your children. Please feel free to visit us on Instagram, Facebook or YouTube and to leave comments or ask us questions. We would love to hear your suggestions for upcoming videos or group discussion themes. In the end, my mission is to make second language learning less of a scary thing and more of an enjoyable moment. It’s all about communication and bringing people together :)

Just speak!

Danielle