Snow Day Reflections on Time

As I sat, bundled up in my bed on this snow-less snowday, the time slipped by, and before I knew it, it was 3:00pm and I had gotten (essentially) nothing done (other than clean my room, eat some scrambled eggs, watch The Holiday, and play Words with Friends). This realization brought me to another -- every day of the work week, I have accomplished so much by 3:00pm, something I love about my job.

By 3:00pm on a typical day, I've taught at least one (usually two) class council lesson, run at least two (usually three) lunch groups, scarfed down my breakfast, tea, and (if I'm lucky) my lunch, seen at least three (usually four) kids individually, consulted (at least briefly, and sometimes, at length) with all eight of the classroom teachers in grades 1, 3, and 5, spoken multiple times with my co-counselor, the principal, the school-based clinician, the behavioral gurus, the secretary, the nurse, and others, and usually attended at least one (but almost always more than one) meeting.

I've checked my email, zipped coats, responded to concerned parents, tied shoes, made referrals to outside counselors, comforted 1st graders ashamed of new glasses and 5th graders questioning their identity, prepped for the next day's individual, group, and classroom sessions/lessons/meetings, laughed a lot, observed students in classrooms, had tough conversations, helped implement behavior plans, decorated bulletin boards (who am I kidding, I haven't changed a bulletin board since November or December), responded to crises, and pushed Kindergarteners (who pretend they don't know how to pump) on the swings at recess duty.

And sometimes, it's just nice to write all of that down. Maybe I'll come back and look at this on the days where I feel like I'm not doing enough. I could always be doing more, but I'm confident that I'm doing a lot, I'm doing the best I can, and I'm developing strong relationships with lots of my students. And that will have to be enough for now.

Three Lessons for a Busy Thursday

Lessons learned:

1) Call, don't email, when parents are upset about something, even if they emailed you. Pick up the phone.

2) Five positive parent conversations can help to balance out one not-so-positive conversation.

3) The Social Thinking curriculum rocks, and everyone should use it. Never have I ever seen more kids admit their own faults than I have in the past two weeks. Seriously, check it out. Superflex works miracles.

And one more for good measure: 

4) Even pig-tailed, pink jacket wearing kindergarten girls are not above taking someone down for messing with their heavily guarded (by sitting on it like a mother hen) rock collection at recess.

That's so funny that I thought I'd have time to write a blog! ;-)

Open House

My co-counselor and I have lots of new ideas for our Open House on Tuesday. Just one of our ideas was to use some new fonts (from http://www.kevinandamanda.com/fonts/) to create a poster to illustrate what we do. Like we did with the "Be" bulletin board, we will print the words on colored paper and cut them out to paste on poster board.

Here is a link to the pdf in case you want to do the same!

An example:

Pinterest

Here's a link to my Pinterest School Counseling Board: http://pinterest.com/amster526/school-counseling-ideas/. When I have a spare minute (yeah, right...), I am going to try to organize these ideas into a binder, maybe on LiveBinders.com or I may cut them out and organize them on paper, as suggested here. Unfortunately, I've done a lot more "pinning" than "doing" of these ideas... Totally overwhelmed by the wealth of ideas and resources! But I have a week of 8 classroom lessons, at least 9 lunch groups, 5 meetings, and a fitness class (hosted at the school for $4!) ahead of me, so organization will have to happen another night!

And sometimes it all falls into place...

At the beginning of the week, I started making phone calls to parents to introduce myself and see if they had any questions or concerns. One parent called back and said she'd been meaning to call -- she and her husband were recently separated and she wanted someone to check in with her two children. I told her I'd be happy to do so. When I went to get her daughter from class, I just happened to walk in when the classroom teacher was having the students work on drawing a picture of their families. I casually pulled up a chair next to the student, and she almost immediately volunteered that her family had four people in it, but that her parents were separated now. She made it too easy! We flowed naturally into a conversation about what it's like to have parents in separate homes and what those changes felt like. She told me her mom had said she should go to counseling (to which she told her mom, "What?! I'm not crazy!" ;-)), and so we talked a little bit about what a school counselor does and how you don't have to be crazy to talk to one.

By the end of the day, I was able to sit down with the mom and both kids to talk about what feelings the kids were having because of the separation. To do this, I cut out a feelings faces poster and had the kids spread out all of the feelings in front of them and choose some that they were experiencing to talk about. I was really nervous for this session, but it ended up going pretty well, I think, and the family was an ideal one to work with. The mom was honest, and real, and supportive, despite how difficult it was for her to hear feelings like shocked, confused, and disappointed coming from her sweet children.

Lesson of the day: sometimes things flow seamlessly and fall perfectly into place, and even though it wasn't a conversation that ended tied neatly in a bow, we got somewhere.

Favorite Moments So Far

6) Talking Indy racing with the 5th grade boys -- totally gave me street cred.
5) Greeting students and parents at the front door -- only one kindergartener had to get carried in.
4) Helping out in kindergarten lunches and recesses -- so interesting to watch their interactions.
3) Hearing one of my new 1st grade friends said, "Hey! Where were you today?" as he walked out to the bus because I spent most of my day with 3rd and 5th graders -- it's nice to be missed!
2) Giving out my first Otter ticket (part of our PBIS program) to a student who was unexpectedly doing an "expected" behavior -- walking down the hallway even though no teacher was supervising him. And when that same student chose to work cooperatively with the new girl in his class and discovered the benefits of teamwork. And then when I happened to get to speak with that same student's mom and step-mom (on separate occasions) and relay the good news.
1) Watching the new student in 3rd grade that I had in a lunch group today win Diary of a Wimpy Kid Uno fair and square just as our time was up and beam from ear to ear -- I had been secretly hoping he might win!

I had a great first two days, and I'm back for more tomorrow. Then, back to NY for the holiday weekend!