What's Inside Your HeART??

Well, hello again.....I hope these spring months have been good to you and you have been recharged and rejuvenated over spring break. I know the break was a welcome chance to unplug and relax for me!!! I have been committed to prioritizing family & friend time and "ME" time in 2016, and I have really stuck to it!  Remember my New Year's post?! Of course, this commitment means the blog posts have not been plentiful, but when I do write, I hope you will find it useful.

March was a BUSY month for me, and I think that is typical for most school counselors. Students (and staff) are tired and ready for a break, and problem solving skills tend to deteriorate. There was a lot of student conflict, and I found myself using my mediation form and problem solving card OFTEN! I also taught some really fun diversity lessons to my grade levels, which I will share in a future post.  I saw a lot of students individually and got a chance to implement some of the skills I wrote about in my post from the ASCA conference last July.  In particular, I loved using the feeling heart from the Counseling with HeART session by Julie Ford to help students, especially younger ones, process their feelings

I start out by having students draw a heart and choose colors to represent each feeling. Then, they color in sections of the heart to represent how much of each feeling they currently have.  After brainstorming behavior strategies, disputing irrational thoughts, coming up with a solution-focused plan (or whatever theory I am currently using to help!), the student re-colors the heart to show if any feelings have changed.  You can also have the student reflect on the chart from one session to the next if it's a more complicated problem and needs more time to address. In addition to allowing the student to be growth-oriented and giving them a concrete visual that feelings can change and improve, it also provides awesome pre and post data for counselors! Check out some student examples below.

Heart Example #1:  In this example there is no feeling key, but the student colored in the following feelings:  Angry (red), Sad (blue), Happy (Purple), Scared (Green).  After our session, the student colored over half the red and all the green with purple to show increased happiness. We still had work to do on the rest of the anger and sadness, but it was a start!

Heart Example #2:  My second example does include a feelings key, which I really liked creating while the student and I talked about different feelings you can have. This student was feeling very angry when we started the counseling session. After working together, the student colored in about 75% of the heart purple to show we had figured out appropriate ways to get rid of angry feelings and feel more happy.  Again, we still had to work on that last 25%, but we had definite progress.

I liked this art feelings activity so much that I created a template I could pull out of my individual counseling folder anytime it would be useful for a student. I have found that having resource folders for common issues ----conflict, anger, friendship, family, perspective-taking, etc.---- in a hanging wall organizer helps me be ready when students come in with concerns. It also saves me a ton of time because I can quickly find a visual resource to help focus our individual session instead of creating something new each time and spinning my wheels. With so many students and so little time, it has become a great time-saver! 

For this template, you might have a younger student that only lists two or three feelings in the feelings key or an older student who is able to discriminate 4 or 5 feelings with different colors that need to be represented. I included six boxes for different colors, but you can always add more boxes. Hundreds of you got this freebie in its first weeks on TPT, and you can still find it here as part of my DOLLAR DAY items on my Life on the Fly TPT Store! 

Enjoy and Happy Counseling! ~ Angela