With a new school year upon us, now is a great time to help your child set new goals. Goals keep children focused on improving their academic skills and helps them realize accomplishments, which gives them confidence and motivation to keep doing better.

But how do we help children set goals? There are many things to avoid and keep in mind, such as setting goals that you want, but they might not necessarily feel the same about. The key is to let children set their own goals (with guidance from you, of course) so that they can take charge of their own trajectory.

Set 'SMART' Goals

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. The SMART acronym, first developed by business management theorist Dr. George Doran in 1981, has since been applied to a wide array of fields, especially education.

For children's goals at school, the acronym is especially helpful because it helps us narrow down exactly what we want to achieve in the realm of what is possible and useful. Here's an example of a SMART goal outline for a child entering kindergarten.

• Specific: Reach the first-grade reading level.
• Measurable: Aim to read at least one new book each week.
• Achievable: Accomplish reading at least one new book per week.
• Relevant: Improving one's reading level is necessary for improving academic performance.
• Timely: By the end of the year, the child's reading level should be ready for the first grade.

As you can see, the SMART acronym can be easily applied to all different grade levels - and maybe even yourself!

Visualize Goals

Visualization is often used by people in high-pressure situations who imagine themselves accomplishing their goal before they set out to do it. For our purposes, though, we can take this concept and make it a bit more literal by writing the child's goals down and placing them where they can be seen on a regular basis.

There are many different goal worksheets for children available online. By filling these out, children express and think about their goals. Just doing this already makes the goals feel more tangible. Worksheets also help you flesh out a plan to help your child achieves those goals. This also helps children because they realize goals can sometimes involve many steps and can take quite a bit of effort to achieve over time.Filling out goal worksheets - or even just placing little Post-It note reminders around the house - is a great way to help children visualize and be reminded of what they need to do to accomplish their goals.