Being Visible: Introduction to the School Counselor

Every year I start the school year introducing myself to students and explaining my role as a school counselor.  My K-2 students need the refresher as they get used to their varying degrees of school experience and truly begin to understand how I can help them during the year.  My 3-5 students know how I can help them by this age, so I spend a short time on the school counselor's job and then link it to goal setting for the year.  This year I got pretty excited  about using some creative, new ideas to start the year with some fun.  My kids loved it!

First and Second Grades
Over the summer, I was walking through Outdoor World when I saw this log.  After I pushed the "tester" button and saw the fake, flickering fire with the glowing embers, I knew I had to incorporate it into a lesson somehow.  You can also buy it at Amazon here.



My co-counselor and I decided to create a "CAMP COUNSELOR" theme for my younger kids and assembled my camp gear:  fake marshmallows, skewers for roasting, a backpack, lantern, binoculars, and camping clothes.

We wrote questions about the school counselor on each of the marshmallows and laminated them.  During the lesson we gathered students around the campfire, asked volunteers to come up and roast the marshmallows, asked the questions, and discussed them as a class.  *You can find the lesson plan and marshmallow question templates on my TPT site or the Life on the Fly Store.


The questions included:
- Where is the school counselor's office?
-  Can you show up any time you want?
- What is something you would talk to the counselor about?
- When will you see the school counselor?
-  Is the school counselor like the principal?
- What does the school counselor do with character traits?
- Does the school counselor tell people what we talked about in her office?

We obviously had a great time hamming it up!!! I wish I could share some other action shots from the actual lessons, but you will have to visit my school website for those. I don't put pictures of my students' faces on my blog, even if they have Internet permisson. :o)

Third Grade

In third grade, we did a True/False quiz about the school counselor's job using similar questions as above.  The final statement said "The school counselor can help me reach my goals this year", which is obviously TRUE.  We related this true statement to the goal of having a classroom community where everyone feels safe, happy, and is able to learn each day.

We read the fantastic book, Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud, and we learned how to be bucket fillers.  You can find it here.  Students created the forms below writing actions they could do or words they could say to be bucket fillers, and we added it to our hallway bulletin board.  I also gave students an extension activity of Bucket Filling Bingo they can work on over the next couple of weeks. I never want my one 45 minute lesson to be the only time they think about what we have learned.

Fourth and Fifth Grades

We also started our fourth and fifth grade lessons with the same True/False quiz as third grade.  Then, I went through a Smartboard lesson I had created on SMART goals.  The fourth grade Smartboard lesson went through each letter detailing how you create a SMART goal. The fifth grade Smartboard lesson was a review (since they had the detailed lesson last year), and we practiced  identifying each letter in goals that had already been written, as well as sorting SMART and NOT SMART goals.  Then, both grades made these fun hands (totally a Pinterest find!) showing them reaching for their SMART goals.  They wrote action steps down their arms, also covered during the lesson, to show the specific steps they would take to reach the goal.

All of these lessons were really fun to do and got the kids excited about the year!! My Kindergarten students still haven't started school so I will share their lesson next time.  It was a great first week.  I would love to hear ideas about your Intro lessons, too. 

~ Happy Counseling!     Angela