School Counselor Blog

Guest Post by Jeff Reams, The Counseling Geek Anyone who has attended the  ASCA National Conference can easily answer the first question. Those that have not - you are thoroughly missing out. The ASCA conference is three days of networking, learning from over 100 breakout sessions, and getting encouraged by top keynote speakers (like Michelle Obama!). How cool is it? It actually afflicts those who attend with PADS after leaving! Sadly, there are some school counselors that have never attended and one of the main reasons is because there is a lack of funding. That is why we are back for another year of the School Counselor Community Scholarship (#SCCS15) . We have upped our donation/fundraising goal from last year to 5 full registration scholarships ($1, 750) to give to some school counselors in need! The recipients of last year's scholarships really enjoyed their time at the conference: Bridget Helms of Jane Ball Elementary School in Cedar Lake, IN Katie Powers...

In my previous post I shared the first part of my Digital Safety lesson for 6th grade students . During the second half of the lesson I showed students a video focusing on digital privacy and safety.  When looking for a video to share, I went first to  Rebecca Lallier's blog, School Counseling by Heart  and found this awesome video below. (Rebecca is an expert on all things child abuse so be sure to check out her MANY resources!) The video is about a girl who has a public account online. It outlines some of the dangers of having your information open and available for anyone to see. It is 8 minutes and 34 seconds long. Before watching the video with my students, I explained that the video we are about to watch can be a little creepy at times, but I felt like it was important to for you to see what can happen if we do not take our digital safety seriously.  During the video students gasped at different parts, especially when the predator goes into he...

This week, while one third of the sixth grade was out of the building each day for a field trip, I have been teaching bullying and digital safety lessons in all of the 6th grade science classes. I have had a blast getting to know our new 6th graders. I was planning to share what I did each day of lessons in sequence, but I really just could not wait to share this one with you!!!!!!!!! While planning lessons, I shared with my co-counselor that I wanted to do to  the line game  activity  related to social media and other online site usage for the first half of my lesson of my Digital Safety lesson. He suggested I use   Kahoot!  so students could use their ChromeBooks to respond to the prompts. I never heard of  Kahoot!  before but I was excited to incorporate this new tool into my lessons!  Kahoot!  is an  amazing, easy to use quiz based learning website.   Students can use their iPads, iPhones, iPods, ChromeBooks, laptops,...

Lately, I have a Google Presentation obsession! I love that Google Presentation allows for easy editing and moving things around, unlike a Word or Google Doc. Google Presentation (and other Google Drive Apps) have lots of cool fonts, which is one of the reasons I like to use Google Presentation to print letters for bulletin boards. I recently found a great Maya Angelou quote on Pinterest that goes great with our "Thriving" theme that I mentioned in my post about my Growth Mindset Bulletin Board . I liked how there was a patterned background on this version of the quote on Pinterest . I thought it would make a fun and inspirational bulletin board inside the school counseling suite area. When I saw chevron wrapping paper at Target I knew I had to use it for the background! I used Google Drive Presentation to created the quote for the bulletin board. For the background I used teal chevron wrapping paper I bought at Target in the party supply aisle. I printed out the...

Last year I ran a book group for parents and caregivers.  I  decided to call the  book group "Thriving in the Middle" to counter the negative language surrounding middle school. You often see books and articles about surviving middle school or how middle school was the worst years of people's lives.  I was planning to incorporate the concept of "thriving" and how school counselors can help students thrive into other aspects of my school counseling programming this year.  I have been wracking my brain to come up with bulletin boards ideas to go with the thriving theme.  The first one I'll share is a growth mindset bulletin board.  Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success   discusses the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. Growth mindset is the idea that intelligence can be developed, whereas fixed mindset is the idea that intelligence is static. Growth mindset is popular trend currently in education. I haven...

The topic of the the September #SCCHAT was SMART Goals: Teaching Them, Writing Them, and Reaching Them.    The chat was moderated by Dylan Hackbarth (@dylanhackbarth) , a high school counselor from Washington D.C.. School counselors shared lesson ideas, tips for writing and reaching SMART Goals, and resources about SMART Goals.  You can view the transcript below or   read the full transcript here . For more information about #SCCHAT and transcripts from previous chats visit:  http://bit.ly/scchat-info . #SCCHAT occurs on the first Tuesday of the month unless otherwise specified. To add the #SCCHAT schedule to your calendar  click here . Join us for our September #SCCHAT on October 7, 2014 at 8pmEST.  The topic is Q&A with School Counseling Graduate Students  and will be moderated by Julia V. Taylor @juliavtaylor , author of The Girls in Real Life Situations (G.I.R.L.S.) group curriculum  (and many others!), speaker, doct...