Teachers promoting Careers

It's always such a joy to walk into a classroom and see a counseling related resource I use with students visible in the room. It's also wonderful when teachers do classroom instructional activities that correlate and support the counseling curriculum. I walked down the third grade hall the other day and saw posted outside a classroom a writing lesson that was done on careers and had to share. The students had the opportunity to write about what career/job they wanted when they grow up. They then using card stock people cutouts, decorated the card stock in the career they wrote about. It's very apparent by looking at the pictures below that the students really got into this activity. When talking to the teacher she said she plans to use these cutouts for other activities throughout the year.

Seeing this really makes me excited about our upcoming school-wide Career Day in January! :)

Bullying Awareness on the Wall

To summarize the end of our classroom guidance bullying lessons and to remind students of the importance of NOT allowing bullying at their school, we posted the pledge against bullying in the hallway for all students to see. Students love finding where they signed and I hope it serves as a reminder that they will not bully or stand by and watch it happen to someone else.

I also had the opportunity to do an extension activity with a 5th grade class on the bully machine lesson I discussed in a previous post. To do this activity, I adapted my own version of The School Counselor Blog's anti-bully machine created by Danielle. Students teamed up to do different parts of the machine, some were the 'architects,' their job was to design how the machine would look, some were the 'negative ninjas," their job was to find negative terms and pictures from magazines to put on the 'pain' side of the machine. Lastly, there were the "positive promoters," their job was to find positive terms and pictures from magazines to put on the 'power' side of the machine. Students also used construction paper to write painful and powerful words that have been said to them to add to the collage. Some students even cut out pieces of the machine they created from the first lesson to add to the collage. It is now displayed in the 4th and 5th grade hallway and the students love it!

I wanted to remind students of how to positively and effectively deal with bullying by adding the "What will YOU do to STOP bullying at your school?" section. I made sure to include all the ways we discussed on how they can actively work to stop and prevent bullying from continuing.

Safety Lesson from Fire Educator

A special thank you to Kathy Nieuwhaus (County Fire Educator) for coming to our school this week to do a lesson with kindergarten students on fire safety. A video was shown to students on fire safety/awareness and several volunteer fire fighters also did a demonstration and role-play with students on how they rescue them from danger. They even left souvenier fire chief hats for each students to keep as a reminder that fire fighters are their friend and ready to help when 911 is called. We look forward to having them back during Career Day in January!

Parent Program on Personal Safety

Next week we will begin our last rotation of classroom guidance before the winter break and it will be on personal safety. To introduce this series, I will be co-facilitating a parent program this evening with my wonderful co-counselor! We will be sharing with parents the Yello Dyno curriculum that we will be using to teach students about personal safety. This program was purchased for the counseling department with money donated from a local church to the school. It's a wonderful program that teaches about 'tricky people' and being safe in a developmentally appropriate way that is easy for kids to understand. Come join us this evening from 5:30-6:30 to learn more about Yello Dyno!

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