Intros Pt. 2 16-17

Whew! I have been a busy school counselor! I have been working through the remainder of my intro lessons for this year and trying to get to as many students as I can before my maternity leave begins. I have about 2.5 weeks left!

Due to my pregnant state, I have taken my intro lessons easier this year. See this post for my younger lesson. For my 2nd-6th graders, I've used the same power point with a developmentally appropriate activity to go along with it. It uses true/false statements to review what a school counselor does. Many of the statements are true, but some are false, and some are just not things a counselor helps with in most cases. 

I've been pleased to note how much my students remember about what a school counselor does! Last year was like starting fresh with my students. My predecessor did little to no classroom lessons, so many had no idea who she was or what she did. I started out aiming to fix that. This year I thought they might need to be retaught, but many of them remembered all the ways I can help!

I love doing an intro lesson as my first lesson, though. It gives new students the opportunity to learn what I do and it never hurts to review with my returning students. My favorite part of these lessons, though, is the activity. I give the students an opportunity to tell me what they'd like to talk to me about. While I get a lot of "no" written, cute pictures, and genuine love, I do get many requests to talk about things. Often things they really need to process that I had no idea about! For the older ones, I also give them a chance to tell me what they need this year. What do they hope to learn? What do they need to be successful? 

How do you like to start off the year at your school? What lessons/topics work well for your students?

Check out my TPT store for this power point as well as the developmentally appropriate activity sheet where the students tell me what they want to talk about. 

Tattling Again!

Last year, my tattling lesson was such a big hit with my kindergarten teachers that half of them requested the lesson again on my start of the year needs assessment. All of them said they wanted it again when I asked if they were all interested. I do their intro lessons a week before everyone else so I can do the tattling lesson for their regularly scheduled lesson time. It works out great, and they are loving it again this year! Tattling is something most younger grades struggle with, so hopefully this lesson helps with that. 

Click the link above for the lesson. The beauty of kindergarten is how easy it is to repeat a lesson. I pulled everything from last year out of the filing cabinet this morning before the first lesson. All I had to do was make copies of the coloring page and I was ready to start! 
This year I did simplify the lesson some and left the "five B's" out and tried to focus on emergencies and getting hurt as seen in the post it cards. The post it cards are the biggest hit with kids and teachers. The kids love the participation. The teachers love the examples. By the end of the lesson, they seem to understand some much better what's an emergency (a BIG deal) and what isn't! I also reused the post-it notes, which have lost a good bit of their sticky, so I took two small containers to put under the faces on the board instead of having the kids try to stick them to the board (which I found a lot of our boards had trouble with anyway). 

K-1 Intro Lessons 16-17

In an effort to complete my intro lessons before our bundle of joy arrives, I am getting started on those this week!

This year for K-1, I'm recycling part of last year's lesson. Normally I use The Rainbow Fish to teach this, but this year I didn't want to bend over with the cards so much with my rather large belly. So, I opted to adapt last year's 2nd and 3rd intro lesson for kindergarten!

I'm using the exact same power point from last year that I used with my 2nd and 3rd grade. These images are very similar to the one from my Rainbow Fish lesson. I always hesitate to use power points for my youngest students, but they've done very well with it so far! I go through the power point and talk about all the ways I can help them at the school using the images. At the end, they receive a coloring page that I created myself based on this lesson. They get to keep these to remember all the ways a school counselor can help them at school! 

The power point is available for FREE in my TPT store. This worksheet is also available in my TPT store and is my own original creation.

Lesson Sign-Ups

As I mentioned in this post, my teachers did so well this year at signing up for a time for me to visit their rooms this year. Only a handful didn't on their own. This year the process was much smoother for my teachers and I want to share how it worked at my school.

Last year, I used signupgenius.com for signing up.

I had a supervisor who recommended this when I was in internship. While I like this site, my school really needs a sign up for a day of the week and time, not a specific day of the month. I could not figure out a way for this on signupgenius.com, so we had much confusion last year on when their lessons actually were even though I supply them a calendar specifically for lessons.

This year in an effort to eliminate this confusion, I used a simple Google Sheet from Google Drive. I had several time slots over every day of the week to give teachers several options. This really seem to like this better. This was originally a template I found through Google, found here. I just changed it to suit my needs and made it in our school colors. Having made this now, I bet I could have made this on my own without the need for a template. After they all had a time, I just put two or three, up to four, a day through the month. With only two time slots for each time each day, it was very easy to spread it out over a month. 

(Click to make image bigger!)

A few of my teachers were just amazed that they could sign up and it would immediately be there for everyone to see (so no one could take their time). My school is rather large, so this seems to be the simplest way to have them all pick a time for my visits. While this worked well for my school, but every school is different! What do you do to have teachers sign up for a time for classroom lessons? What do your teachers prefer? 

A New Year

Our school is off to a great start this year! Our students returned this past Tuesday and we are having a great first week.

I have been busy getting ready for the year while allowing for the students I check in with to get settled into their new rooms and new routines! This year I am planning on doing five lessons. I will miss part of the year due to maternity leave. I'm excited for our new little one! But I'm also excited for a new year with my students.
I will begin my lessons starting next week in hopes of getting through my introductory lessons before my maternity leave starts in late October. My teachers were so great about signing up for a time this year! I'll do a post soon on what I did differently this year that seemed to work better for my staff. 

For this year, I plan to do the following for my lesson topics:

1. Intro to the Counselor
2. Bucket Filling (with a discussion about bullying)
3. Careers and Money
4. Motivation and Responsibility
5. Conflict Resolution

Be on the lookout for posts on details for each of these lessons in the months I do them! I also plan to do my tattling lesson from last year for my kindergartners. This one was a big hit with the kids and the teachers.

I've uploaded several new resources to my TPT store for this coming year, and plan to add a few more. If you're interested in any of these topics, most of my new resources are available now.

What big plans do you have for this year? What lesson topics do you plan to use and what resources do you love for those topics? Share the wealth!

Welcome Back!

Welcome back to school, y'all! The system I work for is still on the beautiful system of kids coming back after Labor Day, so we are just picking things up in my school system. 

I know many of you are getting into the full swing of things for this year. Feel free to share any ideas or new programs you are hoping to get off the ground this year! Personally, this year I found I will only be at one school instead of two! :D That will make it much easier to schedule lessons and time for students. I hope to be able to do more groups and individual sessions. I have also been tasked with a bulletin board for parent/student information. I plan to include some attendance facts and some quotes for parents and students.

As I started looking for quotes, I decided I wanted them to be cute and eye catching! So, I made my own with quotes found online! I've decided to share these with all of you. Click here to get a copy from my TPT store. There are 18 quotes in the following seven backgrounds. To celebrate back to school, my entire store is 10% off now through Monday!

Good luck this school year! 

Happy end of the school year!

Today is the last day of school in my county. I know I have had a wonderful year, and I hope you have as well. I hope you and your students have a wonderful summer!

Any great ideas brewing for next year at your school? Share them!

Respect: 4-6

Whew! What a crazy month this has been! As we wrap up the school year in my county, I wanted to do one last post for this year's lessons. I made a previous post about respect with my K-3 classes.

Originally I had planned to do a superhero themed respect lesson, But I love Tacky the Penguin so much, I decided last minute to adapt this lesson for my older kids! It ended up being a pretty fun lesson talking about how we are all different and how we need to respect the differences in others. 

First, I start off with a game. My kids love games! It is an adapted version of Simon Says in which only some kids get to do each one each time. I'll have students with green eyes raise their hands or have students whose favorite sport is basketball put their hand on the head. I mix up my directions, so I also tell them they have to be listening to what I'm telling them to do in addition to whether the current topic applies to them. The point of this at the end is that we are all different. I ask my students what they noticed during our game, and nearly every class manages to say how we are all different with little prompting. 


Next I read Tacky. My older students do enjoy being read to. They are more attentive during my reading than during any other time. After I read Tacky, we talk about how different Tacky was. I then ask them who thinks Tacky got picked on by his friends because he was weird or different. Most students believe he would have been. We then discuss how we shouldn't do that and I remind them how different we all were in our game. I tell them they will meet some people who are oddbirds like Tacky. They'll meet some weird people. They may like these people or the way they do things, but that does NOT mean they can treat these Tacky-like people poorly because they are different or be cruel to them because they are a little odd. I tell them I expect them to be respectful to these people.

We then switch gears and talk about how if everyone is different, they are the only them the world has. No one is like them. We talk about the word unique and what things make us unique. Their activity is a sheet with ten places for them to write unique things about themselves. I tell them these things need to be things they are proud of and that they cannot be about things they own, except for pets. I give them examples to give them some ideas. I suggest hair, eye color, hobbies, sports they play, cool abilities they have (juggling, spinning a basketball on their finger, doing a back bend, being double jointed, etc.), being short or tall, wearing glasses, having freckles, etc. I give them a personal example of still being able to buy shoes in the children's department. I tell them that I know that's somewhat weird, but it makes me unique and I'm proud of it. I think if you can give them a person example like that it really helps encourage them to think about theirs. Several of mine light up when I talk about my weird little feet! I usually have one ask if I'll take them up, which I don't. I don't need their sheets, and I want my students to remember things they are proud of about themselves. 

You can get my Tacky worksheet AND a copy of the Simon Says game here!