Favorite Lessons of the Month

I teach over 450 lessons a year. Sometimes I just forget what I've done and sometimes a lesson changes multiple times as the month progresses. In an effort to help me remember what worked, I try and blog about my most successful lessons of the month. Here's some of my favorite from the past month:

3rd: We read Ping and Pong Are Best Friends (mostly) and then discussed feelings of jealousy and what we can do to cope with those feelings using my activity packet online. Next we watched this cute video on conflict resolution.

After the video I broke students into teams and they had to create as many conflict resolution strategies as they could. We ended our lesson with some words of wisdom from Kid President.

4th Grade: We talked about perseverance and growth mindest.

First we read one of these awesome books:

As we were reading or during reading students wrote down examples of a negative or fixed mindset. You can use blank post it notes or Counselor Keri has an awesome resource for this lesson.

Next we watched some great videos on Class Dojo. 

After watching the videos I put students into groups and each group had to change at least 4 fixed mindset statements into positive mindset statements. I made it a relay race and as teams finished they either got supplies for the Marshmallow Challenge or the paper for the Class Dojo challenge. 

5th- We are doing to Weird! Series. Check out all the details here.

NSCW18

It's NSCW again!
I'm a little behind this year due to a illness, snow days, and a never ending to do list. Here's a little sample of how we are celebrating!

Sharing - I always put together a newsletter with a little info. about why we celebrate, what school counselors do, and different challenges for the week.

Challenges- Each year I challenge my classes to participate not only with the ASCA signs, but also with trivia challenges along with the way. My questions this year were about stars and me, but they can also be about your role. One year I asked students questions that reviewed what we had been learning in class. For example - what are the 2 times we tell an adult (the 2D rule)? (answer: when something is dangerous of destructive).

Mystery Reader- Mystery reader videos are so fun. My teachers and staff read a book, but hide their face. We upload videos onto our announcement system Canvas for teachers to watch when time allows. If the class can guess the reader they win a prize. See an example of my amazing music teacher here:

This week I am the mystery reader and I read I Wish You More!

Teacher gifts:  I totally stole my idea from this great blog: http://www.rebeccapropes.com/2015/05/teacher-appreciation-gift-diy/

Visit this page as I continue to update what I am doing as the week progresses!