During September, we visit each child's classroom to introduce ourselves to the students and teach them about the role of a school counselor. During this lesson, we read the book "The Way I Feel" by Janan Cain and talk about how we all feel a wide range of emotions and it is ok to feel difficult ones such as anger or sadness. Students then drew their faces with the emotion that they were feeling that day.
Lesson 2 - Anger Management, "Chill Skills"
In this lesson, we learned "how to get angry". I taught students that everyone gets angry and that is a perfectly acceptable emotion. However, it can be one that is difficult to control and it can often get us in trouble. We read the book "How Do Dinosaurs Say I'm Mad?" by Jane Yolen & Mark Teague, which is about a dinosaur who makes both positive and negative choices when he is mad. Then, we identified "chill skills" to help us chill out when we get angry. The chill skills we talked about are: move away, count to 10, deep breathing, talk about it, write or draw, stretch or exercise, and get a drink of water.
Lesson 3 - Tolerance
In this lesson, we talked about tolerance and accepting others for who they are. We discussed how everyone in our class is different from each other and how boring it would be if we were all the same. Then, we read the book "The Crayon Box that Talked" by Shane DeRolf. This book is about a box of crayons that don't get along because they are all different. Then, a little girl buys the crayons and shows them that together they all make a beautiful picture. After the story, students completed an activity where they identified something that makes them unique from other people in their class.
Lesson 4 - Self-esteem
In this lesson, we discussed self-esteem and what it means to have high and low self-esteem. We talked about how everyone has days that we don't feel great about ourselves, but it is always important to remember the great things about ourselves so we can feel good. We read the book "Elmer" by David McKee - which is a book about an elephant who doesn't look like the other elephants because he is patchwork colored instead of elephant colored. He feels like all the other elephants laugh at him and make fun of him, but at the end of the story he realizes that he is an important part of his pack and without him, the elephants would not be the same. We discussed how we all make up an important part of our class and families - and without each of us, those groups would not be the same. Students then colored their own rainbows made up with colors that represent them (favorite color, eye color, color of favorite ice cream, hair color, etc.). We talked about how no two rainbows will be exactly the same - and that is a beautiful thing.