2021, 2022, 2023 and Beyond
Yes, this page covers two (mostly) full years of classroom lessons, and the hope for continued future lessons! The 2021-22 school year followed the birth of my daughter and so I took time off in the fall to stay home with her. Second Step lessons continued to run in my absence with the Transitional Kindergarten and Kindergarten classrooms, but classroom lessons with Grades 1-5 were absent until my return to school and as such the SEL focus for the remainder of the year looked slightly different. I was able to work in 1-2 lessons from each of the three Social-Emotional Learning Standards as well as the yearly College/Career lesson with every grade, but it wasn't the kickoff to new lessons as I had been looking forward to. Queue the 2022-23 school year...
Believe it or not, but 2022-23 was the first typical year for me as a School Counselor in all of the 6 years I have been working. For a multitude of reasons, but mostly because I was at school the full year and that gave me the opportunity to run a full year of classroom lessons with every grade. Lessons that were finished, abiding by both WA state standards and ASCA standards and met the needs of all students according to our own SEL Standards (instituted during the 2019-2020 school year). And wouldn't you know, after all of the groundwork had been established the past three years, the school year was an absolute blast! I had the most fun I have yet had as a School Counselor throughout a year in its entirety and I was able to do all that I set out to accomplish at the start of the year.
So now I set my sights on the future and what it will look like to continue teaching these lessons to all grade levels, adapting them as needed to best fit the needs of our students. That also means that I have a lot of grade-specific lesson information which I am delighted to share concerning both focus and content. These lessons and goals will be what students work on as they progress through elementary school at MAE, whether a student is with us for one school year or all the way through. And the biggest way that you can partner with me as a parent/guardian will be to read the SEL content that your student is focusing on for the current school year and talk about it with them. Tell them about your own experiences with identifying emotions, managing emotions and remembering to have a Growth Mindset. Ask them what they learned, what activities they did and what stuck with them the most after I left their class. Then come back here next year and do it all over again and again and again. I appreciate your commitment to your child, to their academic and social-emotional education and to the school-family partnership that we strive to build for each and every student at MAE.
Follow the links below to jump to specific grade-level pages:
**The location of these pages, currently sub-pages under this tab, is likely to change in order to make the content more visible and accessible to new families in the coming school years. However, when that happens the links above will still work to bring you to the right place.