March Madness: College and Conflict

                           *ottavern.com

March Madness is such an appropriate title for this time of year. Of course, I love the NCAA basketball games, the "bracketology", and the friendly rivalries, but it is also kind of a crazy time of year with its own madness:  student behavior issues, tired teachers, lots of meetings, and long days!

Lately I have been dusting off some of my behavior interventions in preparation for the friendship spring fever that inevitably crops up at this time of year.  I have my Problem Solving card ready that I wrote about in my "Free Fish" post here.  I also created a Rumor Blocker reminder card for my upper grade students as a follow up to my Steps to Respect lessons in third, fourth, and fifth grades.

I use these cards to give as student resources following individual counseling sessions, mediations, or small group sessions dealing with friendship issues.  I will be adding both freebies to the Life on the Fly Store.

In addition, our school recently implemented a STAR ticket program as a positive reinforcement system (PBIS) to motivate students to make good choices.

I am the lucky TV personality that gets to call winning tickets on the news broadcast each Wednesday and monitor prize patrol outside of my office.  In addition, I started a new small group behavior intervention where students earn points for doing homework, earning STAR tickets, earning verbal compliments, attending daily check-ins with me, and making it throughout the day with no tallies.  They can then redeem them for one of the fun activities on my reinforcement prize menu (token economy system, anyone?!), which mainly consists of group activities we do together such as an iPad game lunch, recess games, or working on a technology project together.

I also decided to kick up the fun factor related to March Madness and created this bulletin board linking future college choices and geography with the basketball tournament. When you scan the QR code, it takes you to an updated NCAA tournament bracket.

  

I also found these great mascot sheets and shared them with my upper grade teachers so they could do a map search with their students on a rainy day during recess or as a filler activity before lunch or specials.  Happy Counseling! ~ Angela

Free Fish Follow-Up....Are We Still Swimming Along?

A couple of months ago I wrote about a few classrooms that were experiencing major Spring fever and not in a good way. There was lots of name calling, eye rolling, and leaving classmates out.  I went into the classrooms and presented videos and the book Simon's Hooks, one of my personal favorites.  The students made "Free Fish" cards, which I shared in a previous post.  Here's an update on what I have done since that lesson.

A positive classroom atmosphere (and school atmosphere for that matter) is of upmost importance to a successful school year.  When I think of achieving the right atmosphere in terms of behavior, I imagine a seesaw of social skills.  Students have to learn how to handle the inevitable conflict that will come up, but they also need to learn how to contribute to a positive environment and create the kind of atmosphere they want to learn in each day. There has to be some action on each side of the seesaw to achieve an optimal environment. In that frame of mind, I started having lunch bunches with students in my target classes to focus on the positive behaviors. As I met with one third of the class in each lunch bunch, I followed up on the free fish strategies and gauged whether students were using the strategies, which  ideas seemed the most helpful, and discussed any other recent conflicts.  Then, I read the book Have You Filled A Bucket Today? with them. This series of books by Carol McCloud (see below for another title I have used in the past) is great for promoting positive behavior, and I have used them in personal/social guidance lessons when I am talking about treating people kindly and making friends, as well as in my introductory school counseling lessons in August.  In fact, I am planning on using them again this August with ALL grade levels and creating a bulletin board similar to the one pictured below using student work created in the lesson.

After reading the book, I challenged my students to a game of Bucket Filling Bingo.  Each student received a bingo card at his or her lunch bunch and was instructed to return it to me when the card was completed (Blackout Bingo Style).  In order to have students really reflect on their bucket filling behaviors, I asked them to write the person's name whose bucket was filled with their action in each specific square.  I included behaviors such as asking someone to play, giving a compliment, saying "I'm sorry", and saying "Good Morning".  The students were really excited and have already been turning in their completed cards. I am giving them a small treat from my prize box when they return it, and I hope this "pay it forward" mentality will create a domino effect that continues throughout the final 21 days of school.  Happy Counseling!

                                          Angela

Be a "Free Fish"

My friendship refresher lessons have continued into the upper grades as my co-counselor and I work hard to give students strategies to handle conflict appropriately.  I decided to use the book Simon's Hook, which I absolutely LOVE and use for classes, groups, and individual students.  There are so many variations of what you can do with this book, and I highly recommend it for any school counselor.

In second grade, I like to read the book to make sure the students fully understand the analogy of not biting the hook to the choice of reacting appropriately to teasing.  For third, fourth, and fifth grades, my co-counselor and I decided to switch it up and add a little more excitement with some You Tube videos, a fishing pole prop, and a visual reminder product the students could keep.  Also, I did some qualitative data collection with four classes that contain the majority of our self-referred and teacher-referred students (more on that in an upcoming post!)

To start our "Free Fish" lesson, we showed the following video on You Tube that my AWESOME co-counselor found.

 Then, I used my own fishing pole to assess comprehension and let the students summarize what we had just learned in the video about keeping control and power ourselves and being a free fish.  Students worked in cooperative groups to brainstorm hooks that they hear in their own classroom, at recess, on the bus, or in their neighborhoods.  After sharing some hook examples from each group on the Smartboard, I did some pre-teaching on the five strategies that Grandma Rose was about to introduce in the second video.  Then, we showed the second video.

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These videos are by far the best supplemental activities that I have seen for Simon's Hook, and the kids loved them! After reviewing the second video, I introduced the Free Fish Card to students (see below for a blank and completed example). We had students fill in the five strategies from Simon's Hook as well as other strategies we learned earlier in the year from our bullying lessons.  It was also a great time to review the times we automatically get adult help (bullying situations and any physical contact) since I had put that strategy in the middle of the card.

 
To end the lesson, we allowed students to practice being a free fish in an online quiz found here at the
Grandma Rose website. Each class "graduated" after handling five hooks appropriately. The best part is that the Free Fish Cards will continue to be a reminder to students of how to avoid biting the hooks their classmates may throw at them.  Students taped the cards to their desks or pasted them inside their agendas and teachers will be able to refer students to their cards if they hear insults or teasing in class. My hope is that we can all swim free between now and the end of the year!   Angela