Celebrating Growth: 6 Ways to Honor Your Child's School Year Achievements

As the school year comes to a close, this moment offers a powerful opportunity to pause and look back at how much hard work and growth have taken place. Parents play a critical role in supporting each child's unique journey, and celebrating their wins along the way is crucial. This type of celebration positively reinforces their efforts, strengthens your bond, and nurtures core executive functioning skills like metacognition and goal monitoring.

Taking the time to truly celebrate tells your child that their progress was not just noticed, but significant enough to deserve your focused time and attention. Verbal praise is a tricky phenomenon with mixed results on children’s motivation and performance. Cognitive psychology suggests that praise should be centered around progress and process, not results, so this moment of recognition will ideally go far beyond grades and focus on the incredible progress they've made in their learning and development.

Check out these six fun and meaningful ways you can honor your child's accomplishments:

1. GROWTH CHART CELEBRATION

Remember those height charts? Create a "Growth Chart" for the school year! First, work together to brainstorm all the areas your child has grown in. Maybe it's the organization of their now-clean backpack, proactive planning for long-term projects, increased confidence in asking questions and self-advocating, or even mastering a tricky math concept they were struggling with. Write all of their achievements on bright, colorful sticky notes and place them along a vertical line. The visual representation of their progress will be a powerful reminder of just how far they’ve come.

2. “EVIDENCE OF SUCCESS” SCAVENGER HUNT

Turn celebrating into a game! Ask your child to create a scavenger hunt where each clue relates to an area of progress or reflects a skill they've developed. For example, a clue might be: "I used to be disorganized and confusing. Now, I’m all clean and following a clear system!" (Answer: Their folder and/or notebook(s), highlighting their organizational skills). Other examples may be happy memories in their yearbook, grade reports, specific assignments, etc.

3. “2024-2025 HIGHLIGHTS” CREATIVE PROJECT

Creativity plays a key role in boosting learning and children’s well-being, so a self-led project can encourage your child to express their wins in their own unique way. Ask your child to create something that represents what they feel most proud of from the past year, such as a scrapbook, a short video, a drawing, or even a song.

4. “PROUD MOMENTS” FAMILY DINNER

Plan a special family dinner where everyone shares one or two moments from the school year they are particularly proud of – either for themselves or for another family member. This fosters a supportive environment and highlights the collective effort.

5. THEN-AND-NOW VISION BOARD

This moment doesn’t have to be frozen in time; celebrate the past by recognizing its place on the way towards the future! Create a then-and-now vision board together, capturing the beautiful highlights of the past year alongside their goals for the summer or even the next school year. This subtly reinforces goal-setting, encourages self-monitoring of those goals, and keeps that growth mindset alive.

6. REFLECTIVE JOURNALING

As a family, spend some quiet time together reflecting on the year. Use prompts like: "What are you most proud of learning this year?" "What was a challenge you overcame?" "What skills do you feel you've gotten better at?" This encourages self-reflection and deeper understanding of their progress. (See this Peak blog for more on journaling.)

Ultimately, celebrating wins should go beyond a quick “good job” and a pat on the back. This moment can be a shared adventure in acknowledging effort, recognizing growth, and strengthening your connection as a family. Positive reinforcement has the greatest impact on encouraging desirable behaviors, and when celebrating students’ progress, it helps build resilient, self-aware individuals. Plus, taking ownership of their achievements does so much more for building confidence than verbal praise or validation. So, make these end-of-year celebrations fun, creative, and truly meaningful!

Written by Brandi R.

How to Self-Monitor the Progress of Your Goals

Setting goals increases motivation and helps children develop a sense of self. Children who practice reflection are more likely to self-monitor and adjust, increasing their potential to meet their objectives. Self-monitoring techniques combine reflection, mindfulness, and strategy, allowing students to analyze their progress toward a specific goal and plan their next steps.

Self-monitoring can be a multi-step process, which may cause children to feel overwhelmed or stuck. But with the right tools and guidance, children can learn to self-monitor on their own!

Create a Goal

An attainable goal is the foundation of self-monitoring. Without a goal, children have nothing to evaluate, compare, or monitor. This goal could focus on executive functions like organization, academic skills, or behavior-based objectives.

Define Mastery

How will your child know they’ve mastered this goal? What should they know, and what should they be able to do independently? What does success look like—and sound like?

For example, if a student’s goal is “to keep their room clean,” how often does it need to happen for mastery to be achieved? What exactly does a “clean room” mean? Adding specific, measurable details can help avoid vague expectations. For example: “I can keep my room clean 6 out of 7 days each week.”

Break It Down

Break the goal into smaller steps or chunks. Ask questions like:

• “What skills do you need to reach your goal?”

• “How do you complete this process?”

• “What needs to happen first, next, and last?”

For example, writing CVC words includes multiple skills: letter formation, segmenting words, letter-sound correspondence, and understanding vowels and consonants. Breaking the goal into smaller pieces helps students see where they are in the process of meeting their objective.

Monitor Goals

Once children have created a goal, defined mastery, and broken it down into steps, they’re ready to start self-monitoring. Try a combination of these strategies to see what works best for your child’s needs and independence level:

• Create a checklist using “I can” or “I will” statements for each sub-skill within the goal. Children can refer to these to see where they are in the process.

• Reflect each day for 10–15 minutes by writing or thinking aloud. Guiding questions like “What went well?” “What still needs improvement?” and “What is your focus for tomorrow?” can help direct their thoughts and encourage adjustment.

• Check in with your child daily to help them stay accountable for their progress and growth. Ask goal-focused questions, offer reminders, and revisit their goals at different times throughout the day.

• Use visual aids and supports to help your child remember the steps involved in reaching their goal. Let your child participate in designing the visual to increase ownership.

• Celebrate small successes along the way to keep motivation high and highlight their progress toward the goal.

Goals can measure a variety of skills, behaviors, and abilities. It’s important to recognize that each goal involves a process with multiple steps so children can reflect on their achievements and plan their next moves. Teachers can play an important role in setting academic goals and may be a helpful resource when developing sub-objectives for your child. As your child masters their goals, continue setting new ones to expand their understanding, responsibility, and growth!

Written by Ami Z.

Fun Ways to Build Metacognition Over the Summer

Schools all across the country are beginning to prepare for the end of the year. Teachers are preparing final grades, students are turning in their last few assignments, and families are gearing up for summer vacation. Many students can feel the heat of summer approaching and are counting down the minutes until the final bell of the year rings, which means they may be slowly engaging less and less with their coursework. And while students may view this time of year as the “home stretch”, it is an excellent time to encourage them to continue to practice metacognitive strategies throughout the summer months.

“Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one’s thinking” (Chick, 2013). It focuses on the thinking process and allows students to take ownership in their learning through ongoing self-reflection. However, thinking can be an exhausting process. Rapid thoughts, wandering mind, short attention span, and inner dialogue can all be challenges when it comes to metacognition. Luckily, there are strategies to improve metacognition with practice, such as checklists, goal setting, reflection, and many more.  And while there are many schools implementing these metacognition strategies, there are also fun ways to incorporate them at home!

JOURNAL ENTRIES

Reflection is an excellent way to promote the metacognitive process. Questions like “How was your day overall? What went well? Was there anything you would do differently next time? What challenges did you overcome and how?” can help prompt students to process their thoughts with intention. Journal entries can also help students identify any patterns or trends they see in their thinking process. For younger students, sentence writing with pictures would be a great way to start building writing stamina. Encourage students to add details to their drawing or writing and reflect on what they added!

PROBLEM SOLVING PUZZLES

Different puzzles, such as logic puzzles, crosswords, spot the differences, etc., can help your child develop their thinking skills. Logic puzzles can help children reflect on what they know, what they can infer, and what they do not know yet. Working through new information helps build observation skills. Solving puzzles also promotes the use of checklists to help keep track of information that is processed. Puzzles are a fun and engaging way to help students develop self-monitoring skills without it feeling like another assignment.

GAMES 

Various games can help children with metacognition. Strategy games can provide children with the tools they need to analyze, reflect, and respond. You can even ask prompting questions during these activities to help guide their thinking process. Additionally, modeling your thinking out loud can help students see examples of metacognition. Games like Life, Chess, Risk, Sequence, Connect Four, Battleship, Monopoly, and Sorry can help develop these skills. 

BOOK/TV SHOW CLUB

Book or TV Show Clubs can be a great combination of enjoyment and metacognition practice! Scaffolding information into smaller chunks (i.e. chapters or episodes) can help children process information in greater detail. Provide guiding questions, or allow children to ask their own questions, to help promote metacognition. Focusing on problems, solutions, and new learning can help children discover more about the bigger picture. Study guides, journaling, and notetaking are great tools for students to write their thoughts down and think more deeply about the content. 

While it may seem like the school year is ready to close, there are still lessons to be learned, ideas to be shared, and thoughts to be formed. Modeling thinking processes and offering time for ongoing reflection can help children develop their metacognitive skills. Children may discover a hidden interest by improving the structure of their thinking and discovering ways to expand their knowledge.

Written by Ami Z.