1st Grade
Lesson 6: Yoga day!
September is national yoga month! Practicing yoga is not only great for our physical health, but equally as great for our mental health! Yoga helps us stay centered, keep calm, and can help alleviate feelings of stress, anxiety or depression. We talk a lot about the importance of practicing mindfulness during guidance, so we connected that to our fun yoga practice today! Students had a blast!
lesson 5: Feelings and emotions
September 22, 2022
Today in Guidance 1st graders learned about identifying feelings and emotions.
We started our lesson with a discussion question:
"What feelings can you name?"
Students brainstormed and came up with lot's of different feelings! Sad, happy, mad, to name a few!
We then split into teams and played an interactive game. We played feelings jepordy! Students chose an animal card and teams had to guess what that animal was feeling. This was a bit challenging as we learned that we can feel more than one feeling at once, and sometimes it's hard to determine how someone is feeling by looking at their facial expressions alone!
We ended our lesson by doing some feeling matching. Students were given a paper with different animals showing different facial expression and had to match that expression to the correct feeling.
It was another great lesson in 1st grade!
Lesson 3: Setting goals
September 9, 2022
Today we focused on the importance of setting meaninful goals. I had student's focus on the questions:
What is something I really want to be able to achieve a year from now?
What is something I want to get better at?
We read a story about Gerald the Giraffe. Gerald really wants to learn how to reach the tip top of the tree to eat the delicious leaves! He can't quite reach it. He decided to work hard with his P.E. teacher to stretch and train his neck muscles. After one day of very hard work, he still wasn't able to reach. After continuing to work hard for a few months, he did it!
Gerald's story helped student's understand that a good goal isn't something you can accomplish in one day. It will take time, hard work, and effort!
Students were able to connect Gerald's story to their own experiences. Some shared that when they started kindergarten they couldn't count to 100. Now, they can!
At the end of class, student's were able to write out their own goals and share what they came up with to the class.
A few examples:
"I will read 10 pages every night this year."
"I will practice football 3 times a week."
"I will stretch every day."
As a Leader In Me school, it is important for our students to understand the importance of goal setting, changing or adjusting a goal, and setting new goals once we've achieved our goal!
I keep forgetting to take pictures of the first grade class!! I hope I can remember next week!
Lesson 1: Meet the counselor
August 25, 2022
I love to start every year off with a refresher about my role here as the School Counselor at Andrew. We started our lesson off with our 3 mindful breaths. We use a Hoberman Sphere and practice taking 3 breaths in through our nose and out through our mouths. This is a great transition piece to get student's ready to refocus and calm their bodies before the start of every lesson.
First, we did a fun ice breaker. Student's closed their eyes and picked a colored marker. Each color had a different questions students had to answer. A few example questions:
"What was your favorite memory from this summer?"
"What makes you a good friend?"
"If you could choose a superpower, what would it be?"
This is always a fun way to start the year.
Next, we talked about how the counselor can be useful to them in their learning. We discussed what our weekly guidance lessons will look like, how they can come and see me for an individual session if they or their teacher have some concerns, as well as the student group work I start mid-year. We talked about my confidentiality rules. As the counselor I have a specific code of ethics I abide by when working with students. All conversations stay confidential except for these four exceptions:
Someone is hurting you
You want to hurt yourself
You want to hurt someone else
You give me permission to share with another adult
We break this down for them to better understand, I explain that my job is to keep them safe and these rules help me do that!
Lastly, students filled out a questionaire for me to better get to know them and colored a picture of how they spent their summer.
It was so great getting back into the classroom with our 1st graders! I forgot to get pictures this lesson, hopefully I can remember for next week!