Counselor Tech Shout Out: Fluid app

This month's tech shout out is...

Fluid, which is a (free) app that I just LOVE!!!  Have a student that needs to calm down or need to calm down yourself?  This is certainly the app for you.  It's very simple, just some rocks, water and calming music.  The cool factor is that you can move your fingers across the screen as if you were running your hands through the water.  The best part is it looks and feels as if you are touching a liquid surface (minus the potential mess of water splashing all over your office).  I found this app to be very beneficial as a school counselor and I'm sure you will too.  Take a few minutes to relax and enjoy this app.

Screen shot of rocks & water.  Simple yet extremely practical!

Do you have any other calming apps to suggest, please share.

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Counselor Bloggers Meet & Greet

School counselor bloggers Danielle from The School Counselor Blog and Andrea from JYJoyner Counselor Blog will be presenting "Get Your Blog On" a session about creating and using blogs in your school counseling program at the ASCA conference July 3, 2013 in Philadelphia.  Since we're talking about the wonders of school counselor blogs we want to host a School Counselor Blogger meet and greet (it will be open to everyone).  

To plan and get a feel for our event we want to know which school counselor bloggers will be in Philly to join us.  

School counselor bloggers click here to answer a brief survey to let us know if you'll be at the ASCA conference.  

Details will follow with an invite to both bloggers and blog readers.  We are both very excited about the opportunity to meet and connect with other school counselors!

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2012 NCSCA conference

I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at this year's North Carolina School Counselor Association (NCSCA) conference in Greensboro, NC.  Each year this conference allows me to connect/network with other school counselors, get great ideas from the breakout sessions and come back with fresh ideas to try at my own school.   I have attended this conference each year that I have been a school counselor and this year was hands down the best one that I'd been to.

The opening keynote speaker Dr. Rita Pierson was so funny, insightful and inspiring.  She had the full attention of the audience and was a phenomenal speaker!

Dr. Rita Pierson

I had the pleasure of sharing iPad tips & tricks with a wonderful and excited group of school counselors.  Two of my classmates from the Advanced School Counseling Program at UNC-Greensboro were in the audience and it was so good to see them.  If you're still thinking about the program, there's still time to apply (deadline is 12/01/12).

My classmates from UNC-Greensboro: Gina & April.

Next I attended a session on "A practical guide to elementary book clubs for boys and girls" presented by fabulous counselor pal Angela Poovey, who always has fun and practical ideas.  I certainly got some more ideas to use in my book club and some great book suggestions.

Angela Poovey shares awesome book club suggestions.

I also attended "Creative activities for small group counseling"presented by the amazing Dianne Senn, (whom I'm sure many of us own several of her books).  She shared some great group lessons and activities that I'm sure I'll be using in the near future.

After all the sessions, it was time to let loose!  There was a mixer with food + dancing= fun!  We all know that the Cupid Shuffle, Wobble, or Cha Cha slide will bring the masses to the dance floor.

Cupid Shuffle!

Cha Cha Slide

I was able to meet many of you wonderful NC jyjcounselor blog readers (thank you so much for reading).  I certainly enjoyed meeting you all!

Any type of professional conference is a great way to meet other school counselors and get great ideas.  As I said, I had a blast at this year conference.  I'm looking forward to attending upcoming state conferences in the spring (Kentucky & Arizona counselor peeps, I'll see you in March).  Have you attended or are you planning on attending your state's school counselor conference? Pin It

Counselor Blog Shout Out: Cool School Counseling

This month's counselor blog shout out is:

Cool School Counseling

Lauren is indeed a "cool school counselor" out of VA sharing her creative and great school counseling lessons and ideas.  I'm super impressed that as a 2nd year counselor Lauren has even found time to write an awesome blog.  I certainly know that I wouldn't be able to keep up a blog from my 1st-4th years as a counselor, so kudos to you Lauren.

Lauren has shared with us ways to incorporate community service into her counseling program (I'm working on that too!) and had a great bulletin board idea to show the connection between the two.

Lauren has also put the "character" into character education with costumes for each trait (so creative).

This is a blog that I look forward to reading more so add Cool School Counseling to your blog list for more "cool" and neat counselor ideas.

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More apps for School Counselors

First off thank you to the many of you wonderful counselors who have contacted me about using your iPads.  I absolutely LOVE connecting with you and LOVE you sharing with me what a great counselor addition an iPad is to your counselor program!  As promised here are a few more (free) apps that I've found to be helpful:

Classic Clock HD Free:  If you attended the Tech Smackdown at the 2012 ASCA conference, this was the app we used to keep track of our 3 min per tech resource tech time limit.  I've found it quite useful in the counseling world too.  It's great for a transitions and to help speed up transitions among students.  It's just something about the visual effect of a stopwatch that helps put a little more pep in their step.  I also use the timer feature for students that come frequently and would talk all day if I let them (and most of the time it's NOT a pressing issue).  I let the students set the timer for 10-20 mins with the understanding that whatever needs to be shared needs to be done within that time frame.  This has worked well with my "frequent visitors" and most know the routine of setting the time.

Sesame Street for Military Families:   I attended a training on working with military families and we were given the DVD to use, but now it's available as an app!  I don't have many military families at my school, however there are some students that have a relative serving and protecting our country. I think that this is a fantastic app to use with students and parents. There are videos, articles & worksheets (in both English & Spanish).  What an awesome app!  Special thanks to the brave women and men who serve in the US armed forces, we certainly appreciate what you do!

Touch & Learn Emotions: App that helps students identify emotions based on facial expressions.

First Aid:  A handy app from the Red Cross to have when in doubt about how to handle medical situations.  This app provides videos, descriptions and signs to look for during an emergency.

Distress, this is perfect for school counselors!

Too Loud:  Based on the noise level this app shows when the noise level gets to loud and gives a message that the level may damage your hearing.  This app is very sensitive to noise and I'm not sure how totally accurate it is, but if you have a talkative class, this may do the trick in keeping them quiet.  I know of several classes that I'll be sharing this with!

Do you have any counselor apps to add to the list?  Please share.


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Free Compliments Lesson & Activity

Raise your hand if you'll kindly take a nice compliment?  Well I certainly will (I'll raise BOTH hands to that).  I recently did a lesson with my awesome 4th grade students on "the POWER of your words".  I got this lesson idea from a fantastic session on Lessons that Sparkle presented by Julie Ford, a creative and super energetic school counselor from Oregon City Schools (Ohio) at the ASCA conference this summer.

Julie shared a lesson using the book Mr. Peabody's Apples written by Madonna.  This book tells of how words from others lead to rumors that can be very hurtful and cannot be taken back.  On a side note, this book was quite hard for me to find in store.  I had to check out a copy from the public (not school) library, but I have a great alternative...Madonna reads the book on YouTube!  Click here to see the video.  

After discussing the book and how words can hurt I asked the students, do they like to receive compliments.  Of course they responded YES and I told them that they would have the opportunity to give all their classmates a compliment, because compliments are powerful words just like hurtful words (which is very true).  Here's what I did:

-I cut colored (plain white is fine also) paper in half and gave each student a sheet.

-I had the students write their names on the paper and leave the paper on their desks.

-I told the students that they would rotate around the room and write something nice on every person's paper.  I also made note that even if they didn't know the person very well there's always something nice to say, i.e. you have a nice smile, you're nice, you have neat handwriting, etc.

-During the compliment writing I did monitor around the room to make sure that nice things were being written (hello, these are great students, but they're still kids!)

Students write compliments

More compliment writing

Well evidently by the compliments, this student is quite the artist !

This activity was a HIT with the students!  They were really into writing the compliments with their classmates. A bonus is that at the end of the lesson everyone gets a nice parting gift... a reminder of all the compliments that their classmates wrote about them and oh yeah we had apples (Mr. Peabody's Apples, make sure you read Julie's great lesson for more inspiration). 

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Monitoring Student Attendance

Attendance seems to be a topic that comes up every school year and we as counselors always have to think of (creative) ways to decrease student absences, tardies and students leaving school early.  At my school, our Student Support Services Team (SSST) meets each month to discuss student concerns, attendance, who we need to keep an eye on, etc.  This team consists of myself, school psychologist, social worker, nurse, principal and assistant principal.  I actually look forward to our meetings because we always have great info to share and our team works very well together.

This year, our team decided to really put our focus on attendance and let both students and parents know that missing school quickly adds up to hours of lost instructional time in the classroom.  Here's what we're doing this year:

-When students miss 5 or more days of school (unexcused absences) we send home a postcard with the school district's attendance reminder & remind parents to send in a note when their child is absent.  I ordered these postcards from VistaPrint with a blank back.  I typed the attendance policy on a printable mailing label to stick on the back of the postcard.  I made my own labels because you can edit/update it as needed.

Attendance reminder postcard

-When students miss 7 or more days of school and/or have 7 or more tardies from school the school social worker mails a letter to the parents.  This is a common procedure, but this year we added in the number of hours of lost instruction the child is missing based on the number of absences/tardies.  For an example, if the student has missed 9 days of school, we put in the letter that nearly 45 hours of instruction have been lost (5 hrs X 9).  For a sample of the attendance letter click here.

-We decided to "broadcast" the number of tardies and early check-outs from school each day at the front entrance of the school.  I made these signs using Word, printed on brightly colored card stock and laminated.  I used velcro to attach to the wall and sign (easy to put up/take down each day).  Each afternoon, I check the tardy/check-out sign in sheet in the front office and count the number of each.  I use a dry erase marker to write the number for the day.  To print a copy of the signs, click here.  

Displaying the number of tardies/early dismissals  each day.

-I also created a spreadsheet to keep track of attendance numbers for each day for data collection (easier to create charts & graphs using Excel).

Spreadsheet of daily tardies & early dismissals

Create graphs and charts using Excel

 This plan is working well!  The number of tardies has decreased overall (but there's still room for improvement).  At the end of the grading period, we'll recognize students with perfect attendance on our school's tv news show (students LOVE seeing their names on the JYJ news).   I also think that a competition between the grade levels or classes to see who has the best attendance will be a great idea to decrease absences & tardies.  The grade level that wins could have an attenDANCE (get it, a dance) and a prize from PTA.

What ways does your school focus on decreasing student absences & tardies, please share!

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