Small Group Counseling Tips

I am getting ready to present at the KSCA Conference on my favorite topic, small group counseling, so I thought I'd share a few of the slides from my presentation and explain what is included on each. My part-time counselor and I decided last Spring to really get our groups organized, clearly delineate the competencies we want to cover on each of our main topics (social skills, self regulation, emotion regulation, and flexible thinking). Once we agreed on the competencies we reviewed all the evidence based materials and practices for each. In the area of social skills we pulled from a number of good resources (many of which I have reviewed in previous posts) and then also tried to incorporate a picture book for each session in our K-3 groups. We are fortunate to own literally thousands pf children's books. We wanted to assign a book to a specific session and not reuse them in any other group. It is common to address the same competencies from year to year like how to give a compliment but we wanted to use a different book at each grade level and build on the student response required. We have also discovered that just telling students a number (this group will be 8 sessions) is not a strong enough organizer, we like an overview "session map" that the students can see where they are in the sequence so they no there are x number of sessions remaining and what is covered in each session.  For all our small groups we have an activity or response sheet for each session and on these sheets we put a small image of the book at the top. We include a brief description of what was read and taught in the session. St the end of the group these booklets go home and parents know exactly what we covered in the group. Many parents get the books from the library and reread them with their child to remind them of skills that they still need to practice. We have gotten excellent feedback on these booklets from families. Some students will save them and tell us the next year, "I still have the book I made with you." On the slides above I have provided the name of each book we use by session and one of the same pages from our booklets for that grade level. We run so many social skills for kindergarten we have two curriculum - learning how to make and be a friend is a critical life lesson for our young learners. I know some counselors send home the sheets the same day a group meets, but we found that many never made it home but when the booklets get sent home they do make it.