Introduction Lesson

Who is my School Counselor?

To start this lesson, I play a game with my students that I have played many times before in the past with my own class during my teaching days. We play the game "Telephone" where all of us sit in a circle and I whisper a word to the first person and then that person whispers the same word to the person on their right and so on, until the word makes it around the circle. I usually start off with the word "Counselor". After everyone has had the word whispered to him/her, we count to three and shout it out. This is always a fun way to start the lesson and an easy way to introduce myself to the students as their school counselor.  

 Props:

These 4 items were part of my first lesson this year with my kiddos. A lot of the ideas were retrieved from Pinterest and other school counseling blogs while a few ideas I created on my own. 

Prop #1:

The purple bouncy ball was used for an additional listening activity. I told the students to watch as I bounced the ball. I bounced it a certain amount of times and then asked the students how many times I bounced it. (Most kids didn't know the answer because they weren't concentrating on the number of times I bounced the ball.) The second time I bounced the ball, the kids counted silently and then had a second opportunity to count the number of bounces and most often, they got the answer correct because they were paying closer attention. To make this activity a little more challenging, I told the kids to close their eyes and listen to the number of bounces. The students really had to focus on their listening skills. We discussed the importance of being good listeners and how we can miss something important if we are not listening closely.

Prop #2:

The red telephone was given to the students to pass around the circle so that they could tell me their name. (My intentions were to find a play microphone for this, but I just grabbed the next best thing from our speech teacher at school.) Although I am familiar with most of the students, it's important for me to know them by name, and since we have over 1,000 students at our school, it can be a challenge to remember them all. This always give me a refresher course of names I may have forgotten.

Prop #3: 

The book is a creation I made last year. I got the book idea from the Cool School Counselor's BlogSpot. This was a great prop for me to use last year when I was introducing myself, so I used it again this year!

Prop #4:

My fourth and final prop is my School Counseling Toolbox. I got ALL of these ideas from The Music City School Counselor's Webpage. Check out her page to find out what each item stands for and how they relate to the counseling profession. 

 

WORKSHEET:

I created a worksheet much like the Music City School Counselor did on her blog. For my 2nd-4th graders, I added a word search to the back of the worksheet as something fun for them to do after the lesson and to help them remember what each item that I shared stood for and what I could do to help them throughout the year. I created the word search from this web page. To make the activity a little more fun, I gave a treat/prize to the first person who found all of the words in the word search.