October Wrap Up!

Here's a follow up to my bullying prevention post.  I was asked about the bullying card scavenger hunt and wanted to share a few pics of what that looked like. It rained A LOT the week I planned to hide the cards for the students so we could only do it a couple of days. However, I laminated blue "NO Bullying" cards and taped them around the three playgrounds at our school.  Students were able to turn them in to the media center after they were found, and I gave "No Bullying"  bracelets or "Bucket Filler" spirit sticks as a prize.

 

 

I was also pleased with the response of poems, songs, cartoons, and pictures I got from students for original "No Bullying" works. My bulletin board went from this:

 TO THIS (and I still have more to hang)!!!

The Leadership  Club at my school even created these fantastic anti-bullying posters and posted them in our main hallway. I LOVE them!

Now, we can just follow the yellow brick road to November with College & Career Month and fun lessons like Rockin' in my Career Shoes, A Hat for Ivan, Life on a Budget, and many more! Enjoy some pics of "Book Character Day" Wizard of Oz style at my school with my awesome Harry Potter and admin staff.  What a fun day!!!

Happy Counseling! ~ Angela AKA "Glinda"

#GameChangers

I hope John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, will forgive me for hijacking his quote and changing it to convey the emphasis I place on the school counselor's role in a school,but it's important to reflect, how are you affecting your school's climate as a school counselor? Are you being a motivator, welcomer, change agent, and lifeline for the students in your schools? 

This year the theme of the NC School Counselor's Conference is "Game Changers" (awesome theme, Christy Welch!), which is a perfect way to depict what school counselors can represent to the students they work with each day. So, how have you been changing the game the first six weeks of school? Are you the quarterback leading the charge to try new plays, pull out the Puntrooskie (FSU fans will know what I mean. Can't believe I got to use that in a blog post), and score the extra point? Or, are you waiting around for the fourth quarter?  Part of being an effective school counselor is preparing your students for the game before they have to do the two minute drill.  

Glimpses from the Field.....

As I work to proactively prepare students for the new school year, I have been working on many different school success habits.

Goal setting:  Several weeks ago, I got this great tweet.  I was just about to start my annual goal setting lessons, and it reminded me how much fun it is to do this goal setting icebreaker, especially when students can go outside and have some fun tossing around beanbags. Although I usually save this activity for small groups, I have awesome fifth grade teachers and students this year who could totally handle a fun "hook" before we got into the nitty gritty of our SMART GOALS lesson. In discussing "just right" goals we simulated goals that were too easy (basket right beside the student), goals that were too hard (basket 30 feet away), undefined goals and action plans (eyes closed to throw the beanbag in the basket), a "just right" goal (6 foot toss in the basket), and goals with support (adult holding the basket as the student shot).

I also changed my fifth-grade goal setting sheet (coming soon to TPT) into a 3-column tracking sheet so that I can have better follow through during the year to help students monitor their goals. How often have I had students set goals and then not facilitated going back to them to see if their action plans are successful? On my new sheet, students defined the SMART acronym so they don't forget it and then wrote their goal and action steps in column 1. Columns 2 and 3 will be used for "minute-meeting" check-ins in Nov/Dec and March/April to make sure students are still on the right track. As the year passes, new goals will be written or current goals will be modified. I have a copy of every students' sheet and so does the student.  At the end of the lesson we brainstormed the best places to keep the sheet so students will be reminded of their goal on a daily/weekly basis.

For third-grade students, I incorporated a new goal game into my Perseverance/goal setting lessons to provide better modeling of all the different types of goals students can and will have throughout their lives.  I introduced the categories of personal/hobby, career/college, and academic goals and also distinguished between true specific goals and a wish (winning the lottery).  It was a concrete, fun way to check for students' understanding after introducing the idea of goal-setting.  We still used lemons to represent obstacles and ended the lesson with lemonade as we brainstormed strategies that would help students reach their goals and never give up. 

Attendance Awareness: Good attendance is a true game changer for kids with unnecessary, chronic absences. I always implement attendance interventions as a school counselor, but this year was the first year I participated in "Attendance Awareness" month. My county recommended the website attendanceworks.org for some great resources. Each week I shared attendance statistics on the morning show and gave "shout outs" to classes with no absences or those who only had one student absence. The first week we only had 1 class with perfect attendance (blue letters on the bulletin board) so the class got an extra special recess with ME! By the end of the month we had the most class "shout outs" with 13 classes the final week, almost 1/3 of our total classrooms. Classes also received badges on their door to recognize their accomplishment each week. One lucky class made it on the board EVERY WEEK in September and will be spending a fun recess with me to celebrate.

As the weeks progress and absences increase, I will also be starting an Attendance Club to see if daily monitoring, lunch groups, attendance goal setting, and organizational strategies can positively impact attendance data.  

New Students: How are you supporting the new kids on the team?  It is amazing how new student lunch bunches or any lunch bunches quickly help you develop relationships and figure out what is happening in classrooms. I often get referrals for individual counseling from conversations that occur during these lunch groups. This year, I met with all of the new students in my upper grade levels (3rd/5th) after presenting my Introduction to the School Counselor lessons. We did an icebreaker, played new student bingo, discussed the transition with a few small group question rounds, and ended by having students add their names to this bulletin board welcoming them.  I found some great white and metallic chalk markers so names would "pop" out from the black bulletin board paper (in the space to the right of the map).  They also added a sticker on the state/city they had moved from on the map as our administration and school counselor bobble heads cheered them on!

I love football and have enjoyed this analogy to help me stress the importance of a school counselor's role in making each day a great one for students. You may be the one coach that can get through to your players so I hope you will "lace up" and get in the game as the school season continues. #notimefortimeouts #gamechangers

Happy Counseling! ~ Angela

  

October: Careers, College, and Costumes...Oh my!

Whew.....I have not written in three weeks, and I am ready to share! October has been a fun, busy, and eventful month at Cleveland Elementary.  As I mentioned in a previous post, we celebrate Career and College Month in October.  Be sure to check out some of my favorite career resources here if you are planning lessons.  This year, we had two Fridays where staff and students wore college shirts to promote their favorite teams or alma maters.  Teachers also had a blast decorating their doors for our door decorating contests. The winning doors were exceptional with either sound, light, 3D design, and/or student work being incorporated for a phenomenal display. Winning teachers were awarded a small gift card prize to recognize their awesome creativity and hard work, but ALL staff members who participated were given this little "treat" (below).

Our two first-place doors are below (ECU and NC State) as well as our second place doors (Meredith College).  The NC State door had paws going down the hall with recorded student voices making the wolf howl, and the ECU door had purple lights as well as student-made pirate faces to represent each child...very creative Ms. Troxler and Ms. Graham!

The Meredith doors created by our music teacher, Ms. Fitzgerald, were 3D with balloons, an iron gate, and clouds. Lovely!

For some extra fun this year, I asked teachers to complete a career interview so I could present trivia questions on the morning broadcast throughout the month.  It was a big hit, although next year I will have staff (including myself!) type their answers for ease of reading when students look for answers on my bulletin board.  I did add picture clues next to the interview sheets, which helped out a lot! Students were able to find the teachers who matched the trivia questions and put answers in a basket located in the media center.  I drew one correct answer for each question during the week to recognize the winning students, and they received a small prize.  I will add pictures of my bulletin board this coming week!

Red Ribbon Week fell within our Career and College Week so we linked a drug-free, healthy lifestyle to future education and career success on Career Dress Up Day.  I decided to dress up like a NASCAR race car driver and welcomed my "race fan students" with a floor sign as they came into the building from front carpool. It was a great way to start our Friday as I greeted lots of doctors, animal caretakers, professional athletes, business people, lawyers, and builders (as well as superheroes.....who knew you could get paid for that as an adult?!).

We also began our Career Cafe lunch events this week after completing our Holland's Theory lessons with each fifth grade class. Our first speaker, a fire chief,  represented the REALISTIC category.  We had approximely 25 fifth graders join him for lunch, and the best part was when the students got to try on all the fire gear at the end. I have decided to use an exit slip with the students during Career Cafe events this year so I can gather data on knowledge acquired by the students. I will be adding that slip and my Career Cafe invitation to my TPT store in the coming days. We have lined up future speakers to represent the other Holland's personality categories and have some extension activities planned, which I will share when they occur in December.

I hope my NC friends are gearing up for the NCSCA Conference next week in Greensboro where we will be able to advance our education through professional development.  The annual conference is such a great time to recharge and renew enthusiasm about our profession.  I will be presenting the session "Help! I'm in the Specialist Rotation....Now What?!" on Friday at 9am and would love to see you there. It will be a fun time!  For those of you not in NC, I'll be sure to share the highlights in a future blog post.

Enjoy and Happy Counseling! ~Angela

Rockin' in my Career Shoes- Responsibility and Careers

*From Pinterest from instapray.com

October is Career and College Month at Cleveland Elementary, one of my favorite school-wide activities of the year!  There is nothing I love more than linking what students are doing each day to their future education, career success, and happiness.  I feel like I have hit the lottery each day when I go to work loving what I am doing, and I want my students to feel the same way in their chosen fields.

At the very end of September, I sent home this flyer to parents so they would be clued into all the activities we are doing this month.

This Friday is our first college team shirt day so I have been promoting it on the morning broadcast and have been having fun showing examples of what students can wear.  Next week, we will kick off our college door decorating contest with teachers showing school spirit for their alma maters.  It is a great way to get college conversations started and create awareness of different higher education institutions that students can attend. Teachers also have a chance to win prizes for the best decorations if they finish in first, second, or third place. My PTA President, my co-counselor, and I are judges and will be following a rubric to assign points....this contest is no joke! Here are some of our submissions from last year......

Later in the month, we will incorporate Red Ribbon Week into our Career and College activities by having Career Dress Up Day with our daily theme, "Love Your Future, Be Drug Free." My co-counselor and I are also linking the character trait of responsibility to career-focused lessons in all grades K-5 and are gearing up to start our Virtual Campus tour lunches and Career Cafes again.  As you can see, it is quite a busy month! I have written about previous classroom guidance career lessons  in my Life on the Fly posts here and here, and I have added several career lesson plans and activities to my Life on the Fly TPT store here (Budgeting, Hats for Ivan, Pete the Cat, etc.).  Check them out for some FUN, ALREADY MADE career ideas!!!

If you are looking for more professional development on career awareness activities or resources, check out CFNC.org.   I had no idea that CFNC had a Wednesday webinar series prior to being asked to share my ideas as a presenter.  I hope you will find this link helpful in seeing upcoming professional development opportunities that  may be of use to you in planning career domain activities. The PDF handout from my webinar presentation can be downloaded here and is a modified version of the career presentation I gave at the NC School Counselor's Conference last year.

Last, I was extremely excited to try something new this year and incorporated everyone's beloved book character, Pete the Cat, into my second grade career lessons. After introducing the lesson by showing them real shoes as a "hook", I asked students how they could apply the character trait of Responsibility in their jobs as students. Then, I showed a Pete the Cat "Rockin' in my School Shoes" YouTube video, which really got their attention! If you have not seen students dance and sing to Pete the Cat, it is quite an entertaining sight. A brief trailer is below:

We discussed the video and listed Pete's responsibilities as a student.  Next, we completed a Smartboard activity where students brainstormed names of future jobs while putting different types of shoes on Pete.  This activity could also be done in a paper version if you do NOT have a Smartboard.  

Finally, we linked these possible jobs to interests in a cooperative learning activity. Students began to make the connection between things they love to do and jobs they might choose.  Their finished work products included decorating their own rockin' shoes, listing their high school graduation date, and writing the name of the job they are interested in.  

It was a really fun lesson and one I will definitely do again next year. Check out some of my work samples below!  How are you promoting college and career awareness at your school??  

Happy Counseling! ~ Angela

Conference, Technology, and Grants---Oh My!

I have been busy getting ready for my presentation at the NC School Counselor Association's annual conference this coming week. It is a fantastic professional development opportunity, and I am so excited to see colleagues and learn from all the brilliant school counselors out there.  I will be presenting a session entitled "Beyond Career Day", as well as co-presenting with Linda Brannan, the Student Support Services Consultant, for the NC Department of Public Instruction.  I am sharing some of my work on the Guidance Essential Standards.  Here is a link to the NCSCA website if you are interested in any other info about the conference.  If you are also attending, stop by and see me!!!

After the conference, I will be back to posting more regularly because I can't wait to share all the career and college awareness activities I have been doing in October at my school.  I deemed it "Career-College Month" and have been having organizing and presenting schoolwide, grade level, and classroom activities to get my students excited about post high school educational opportunities and future careers.

Also, I am tremendously excited to post that I received a Bright Ideas Grant last week....yay!  If you remember, applying for grants was one of my goals over the summer (See Double Take: What Are You Going to be Next Year? ), and I was awarded $900 from the South River Electric Membership Corporation.

 

I am going to use the money to buy Ipads for my Technology Club, which involves about 60 fourth graders (we split into three different groups throughout the year).  We meet every Tuesday after school to work on technology projects that incorporate character education, anti-bullying strategies, leadership ideas, and anything else my students can think up!  Please check out our blog - Cleveland Tech Stars  and leave a comment. The kids would love it!!!!

Happy Counseling!   ~Angela

Positive Thinking Bulletin Board

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a Perseverance lesson I presented to my fifth graders.  We worked on using positive thoughts or "Recycled Thoughts" as we call them in order to overcome obstacles that may come up during the school year:  difficult tests, new objectives, friendship situations, changing classes, etc.

My students brainstormed creative head images to show what they would be thinking this year to reach their goals. I wanted to share them with the student body so I created a bulletin board for all to enjoy.  I continued the bobblehead theme that my co-counselor and I started at the beginning of the year; the students are really getting a kick out of it! You'll also notice that I included some of the objectives that were covered in this particular lesson. I'm making a concerted effort to post my objectives more often so students, staff, and families can connect my lessons to the Guidance Essential Standards and ASCA National Model objectives. This lesson included more of the ASCA objectives, but I usually list a combination of the two.

Happy Counseling!  ~Angela

Body Basics: Setting the Tone

I love seeing how educators start their lessons.  Each school counselor, teacher, specialist, etc. has his or her own unique way of setting the tone for a lesson and getting kids hooked right from the start.  I wanted to share the way that I have started my lessons for the past nine years. My students all know Mrs. Groovy Poovey's "Body Basics" and it sure helps with classroom management when students K-5 consistently know my expectations during each lesson.  My son helped me act it out, and he knows it well since he is also a student at my school.




What I didn't show is that I will say "Body Basics" during a lesson if students get wiggly or too loud and need to be reminded of how they should be listening and working. If students do a GREAT job, and I don't have to say "Body Basics" during the lesson, we do a "Silent Cheer" at the end to celebrate. It is really silly, but my K-2 students love it. My third and fourth graders do a "Silent Raise the Roof".  I typically don't use it with fifth graders unless I am just giving them a general reminder to remember body basics. So, there you have it!  Happy Counseling!  Angela

Candy: Works Every Time!

Here is a summary of the Perseverance I presented to my older kiddos!

Fourth and Fifth Grades

We started with the same pre-test survey in fourth and fifth grades that I had used in the lower grades, although we added another answer choice to match the older students' higher developmental level.  Then, the fun began!  I chose four students to sample Warheads in front of the class.  They all tasted them at the same time, and I immediately  got one word from each student that described how it tasted.  It was pretty entertaining to see the looks of disgust on their faces and hear "terrible", "sour", "awful" as their adjectives.  Then, I asked them for another word after approximately two minutes.  They shared words like "delicious", "scrumptious", and "good".  We brought this icebreaker back to Perseverance and continuing to try even if something is "terrible" initially.



Then, I introduced the choices we can make with our thoughts when faced with a difficult situation.  I acted out a "trashy" thought and a "recycled thought" (my version of positive thoughts).  The students got a chance to check their understanding of these thoughts with the Kooshball game on our Smartboard (on TPT here).  This game always brings out a lot of student volunteers!  Each time they threw the kooshball (softly) at the Smartboard, a new thought would pop up and the students would decide if it was "trashy" or "recycled". Our final work product to encourage application of their learning was a "What's in Your Head?" sheet that I adapted from Pinterest.  Students drew images of their Smart Goals for the year (see post here) and then surrounded them with recycled thoughts they would use to encourage Perseverance.  They did a really great job, and I am going to use them on a bulletin board, which I will share with you in the next couple of weeks.   
Happy Counseling! ~  Angela

Perseverance: Keep On Keeping On!

I switched around my monthly character traits this year to match my school counseling annual calendar and complement the units I had planned for each month.  Perseverance ended up being my first character trait as I talked about goal setting for the year. I am in the specialist rotation for Kindergarten so I handle their lessons a little differently, but I created Perseverance lessons for 1st/2nd, 3rd, and 4th/5th grades.

My general classroom guidance framework for character trait lessons is:

•  Introduce the Objective of the Lesson
• Collection of Pre-test Data 
• Icebreaker/Hook
• Video or Book to model the character trait
• Comprehension check with my students
• Application of knowledge in an activity

The collection of data has been a work in progress over the last several years as I have focused on simplifying and streamlining my process. I used to collect WAY TOO MUCH DATA and then would never do anything with it because it was too overwhelming and took too much time to analyze.

Now, I typically use a quick multiple choice question as a pre/post test. I ask  students to vote on the definition they think fits best with the character trait word.  Younger students have three multiple choice answers and older students have four multiple choice answers.  You'll see the Perseverance example I used with first and second graders. I add variety by having the students do different activities to share their answers.  Depending on the grade level, students will stand up for the answer they think is correct, go to the corner of the room that matches the letter they are choosing, place sticky notes next to the answer they like best, or simply put their heads down and raise their hands for their choice. After our lesson, I repeat the activity and note the change in numbers.  It is a fast, effective way to document data for each of my classroom guidance lessons.

Here's a brief summary of a couple of my Perseverance lessons:

First and Second Grades 

I read Winners Never Quit by Mia Hamm. 
Then, I introduced a kinesthetic activity to get the students moving.  I brought my glitter soccer ball (a big hit with the kids!) and we formed a large circle. I started by asking the students what skills may be hard to learn in first and second grades. We rolled the ball among us as students brainstormed.   Then, I asked students what they wanted to be great at by the end of the year using the same process.  After brainstorming, the students worked on creating a "Reaching My Goal" booklet.  They drew illustrations for the pre-written pages (will add picture soon).

Third Grade

After getting pre-test data in third grade, my co-counselor began with a rhythm activity. She started out with a simple clapping rhythm that the kids mimicked.  Then, she added complexity to the rhythm with new patterns.  (I was able to get an action shot for you!)  By the end, it was almost impossible for the students to follow along.  She related the increased difficulty to Perseverance in third grade.  We showed this video from Greatschools.org.  It used the  word "Persistence" instead of Perseverance, but we explained the similarities.  The kids loved and understood the drumming analogy since we had just completed our rhythm activity.  Finally, the students brainstormed skills that could be difficult in third grade, and they completed a Goal Setting sheet (see below).

I loved teaching these lessons, and will share my 4th/5th grade lessons next.  Happy Counseling! ~ Angela