by schoolcounselingbyheart | Apr 7, 2012 | Uncategorized
This one is WAY cuter than my visitor was!
My run of bad luck is continuing. I blame rodents. Somehow the brilliantly written (hah!) first paragraph of “The Mouse was the Least of It” was missing from the original post. It might have had something to do with the trauma reaction I experienced while searching mouse images. Or maybe I’m just a dope. Anyway, here it is again for those of you who have this automatically delivered by email. Now you too can be in the loop of what happened before the mouse poop incident. The poop loop! (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.) If you’re stumbling upon this while looking at the blog, you are not having deja vu — I fixed the original post. I hope this is my last rodent-related entry. So, probably, do you. It is unlikely to be the last poop-related entry, as those of you who have been in this school counseling racket for awhile can probably attest. Just saying. (more…)
by schoolcounselingbyheart | Apr 7, 2012 | Uncategorized
This one is WAY cuter than my visitor was!
Yesterday was one of those days when I fantasize about working in a bookstore. At one point my principal and I looked at each other and simultaneously said, “I quit!” The past two weeks has been pretty intense (hence the dearth of blog posts), but culminated on this particular Friday with one kid choking another until he turned purple, confiscation of a toy gun and lighter, a bloody fat lip, a report of sexual abuse, and a live mouse in my trash can that I almost TOUCHED when I reached down to fix the collapsed garbage bag. And this was all BEFORE 9:30 in the morning! The rest of the day didn’t get much better. (more…)
by schoolcounselingbyheart | Mar 27, 2012 | children's literature, classroom lessons, personal safety
What happens when you keep your hurt feelings bottled up inside? The hurt deepens and festers. It gets bigger. This is the premise of The Hurt by Teddy Doleski. When Justin gets called a name, he doesn’t tell his friend how he feels or tell his dad what happened. Instead he just sits with his hurt, which looks like a rock, feeding it with his worries and disappointments until it gets so big that it takes up his whole room. The hurt finally starts to shrink and eventually goes away when Justin talks to his dad about it. The Hurt is a great book to share with individuals, in small groups, and in the classroom. It provides (more…)
by schoolcounselingbyheart | Mar 25, 2012 | death and grief
Before I became a school counselor, I did Hospice work, counseling patients and families, training and supervising volunteers, and running workshops for counselors and teachers. It has come in handy, to say the least: in the space of thirteen years, our school had four students, two non-school-age siblings, four parents, and three staff members die. Of course, life being what it is, we’ve also had staff whose spouses, friends, parents, and other family members died, and students who have lost grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and pets. I plan to write about our experiences with death and grief in a number of different (more…)
by schoolcounselingbyheart | Mar 18, 2012 | classroom lessons, conflict resolution, group counseling, individual counseling
Zax are terrible role models for how to solve conflicts! But their story, “The Zax,” by Dr. Seuss, is a great way to start a discussion about conflict resolution. The zax are two single-minded characters, one who wants to go north, and the other who wants to go south. When they meet face-to-face on the north-south path, neither one will budge. At all. Ever. End of story.
I use “The Zax” to introduce my conflict resolution unit because it perfectly illustrates what happens when you don’t use conflict resolution strategies. (more…)
