Making a Difference

We use several of Cheri Meiners books but this new one is my favorite. She offers some making a deference activities in the back of the book but others are available on her website cherijmeiners The book goes beyond kindness to explain the importance of a good attitude, helping others, and doing something useful. I will use it in a few groups this spring but it would be a great classroom lesson book to expand on the theme of kindness.

Celebrate Diversity Theme: Judgmental Flower

One of my favorite authors and former school counselor and teacher, Julia Cook’s strategy is ‘Read a Book, Teach a Child a Life Lesson’. In her book The Judgmental Flower, she talks about a purple flower who appeared in a blue flower patch. It is a great book for grades 3 and 4 to discuss cultural diversity and racial prejudice. It promotes being open-minded and looking at another's point of view - very important life lessons especially for upper elementary students. I use it in small groups because we use Second Step and MindUp for class lessons mostly. If you are not using an evidence-based curriculum this would make a great starting point for a class lesson on celebrating diversity.
Check out another resource for free lesson plans and materials that go along with Julia Cook's books published by Boys Town boystown/lesson-plans

Got Grit?

Tom Carr, a retired school counselor, thinks hard hats, rope, and running shoes symbolize grit. Carr, like others, believes grit is more important than grades. The Second Edition (2015) Got Grit? is an entertaining collection of true stories of people who had tenacity, perseverance, and who overcame major adversities in their lives. He developed a program in his school to develop "true grit" in four steps: 

Getting along with others (social skills); 

Responsibility (to family, community, church, country, learning, health, nutrition, fitness); 

Integrity (honesty, kindness, compassion, sincerity); 

Tenacity (perseverance, determination).

The book provides ideas about how to implement a Got GRIT program in a class or school-wide.

The Lesson Guide book (2016) and CD offers 24 lessons and activities that can be used in combination with the book (recommended) or independently to teach GRIT to students in grades 3-8. Each of the 4 steps has six lessons. I really like the discussion and lesson on "The Gift of Pain" and a personal GPS (Grit + Pain = Success). To learn more about Got GRIT see  www.gotgrit.org 

To order these 2 books go to youthlight.com While you are on the Youthlight site check out the other 8 books Carr has published. I always like resources that were developed by practicing school counselors because they generally are easy to adapt to my own program. For example, I am planning to use 1-2 of the lessons in my tier 1 classroom lessons in grades 3-5 and the rest in small tier 2 groups.

The Formative Five: Fostering Grit, Empathy, and Other Success Skills Every Student Needs

In Fostering Grit (2013) Thomas R. Hoerr defined grit as tenacity, perseverance, hanging in, and not giving up. Hoerr showed what teaching for grit looks like and provided a sample lesson plan and self-assessments, along with a six-step process applicable across grade levels and content areas to help students build skills they need to succeed in school and in life. The steps for developing grit in students: 1) Establishing the environment; 2) Setting expectations; 3) Teaching the vocabulary; 4) Creating frustration; 5) Monitoring the experience; and 6) Reflecting and learning.
In Hoerr's new book educators will learn how to foster the Formative Five (2017) success skills that today's students need, including
Empathy: learning to see the world through others' perspectives.
Self-control: cultivating the abilities to focus and delay self-gratification.
Integrity: recognizing right from wrong and practicing ethical behavior.
Embracing diversity: recognizing and appreciating human differences.
Grit: persevering in the face of challenge.
The book has a Student Self-Assessment Survey for each of the five skills.
Both these books are published by ASCD so it should be no surprise that the Formative Five relate to all five "Whole Child Tenets": 1) Healthy; 2) Safe; 3) Engaged; 4) Supported; and 5) Challenged. ascd.org/whole-child

Promoting Optimism

Research has identified three distinct clusters of character strengths: Strengths of Will, Strengths of Heart, and Strengths of Mind. Growth Mindset, Grit, and Optimism are all strengths of will. These strengths are what you might call the “doing” strengths. They help you achieve your goals. Free posters with the character traits are availble free to download at characterlab.org The site also has a Character Growth Card that can be used for teachers and students to assess 8 character strengths. For example:

GRIT

Finished whatever s/he began

Stuck with a project or activity for more than a few weeks

Tried very hard even after experiencing failure

Stayed committed to goals

Kept working hard even when s/he felt like quitting

OPTIMISM

Believed that effort would improve his/her future

When bad things happened, s/he thought about things they could do to

make it better next time

Stayed motivated, even when things didn’t go well

Believed that s/he could improve on things they weren’t good at

This is very similar to the KIPP Character Report Card kippnyc.org/kipp-character/

Our school system uses the MindUp program developed by the Hawn Foundation in Kindergarten through grade 8. The curriculum has a whole unit on "It's All About Attitude" including a lesson on Choosing Optimism and a recommended reading list Mind-Up-Optimism_sm.pdf

Empathy Bulletin Board

The MindUp curriculum has a lesson on Expressing Gratitude. It is based on research that shows when we think about someone or something we truly appreciate, our bodies calm themselves. I did this lesson in all our second grades this month. The MindUp curriculum guide suggests growing a gratitude tree where each child writes what they appreciate on a leaf. I decided to create a turkey bulletin board instead and each student made a feather expressing appreciation. They were encouraged to think about people and things we usually take for granted. Several students wrote they were grateful for a clean school, others to their nanny for picking them up each day, and many for their family. Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss

Favorite Author

If you are expanding your library for books to use in classroom lessons and small groups, I would recommend all or Maria Dismondy's books.  She really understands common issues children face including diversity, problem solving, self-esteem, and bullying behavior. Her books promote pro-social skills like kindness and other character traits. I use them in grades 1-3.  To learn more about her work check out her website http://mariadismondy.com

Unite Against Bullying

Our school mascot, a Knight, joined the staff and students for wear orange day October 21 to make bullying end! Orange is the color for fairness in Character Counts. A key word in our definition of bullying is bullying in unfair (a group against one). The Knight was dressed in the a color each day during Character Counts Week.

Character Counts Week 2015

charactercounts.org/

Our state requires that we teach character education.  Our school uses the Character Counts 6 pillars as the foundation of our program. When properly implemented, CHARACTER COUNTS! is an immersive program connecting staff and students through a shared language and framework of values called The Six Pillars of Character. It fosters a positive environment that has been shown to improve overall attendance and test scores while reducing negative incidents such as bullying and discipline referrals. For the week students and staff dress in a color of one of the traits each day.  On Monday we will all be "true blue" for trustworthiness...

Make a Kindness Quilt

The Kindness Quilt by Wallace is a great book for kindergarten through grade 2.  It does a great job of explaining simple acts of kindness.  After reading and discussing in my small group, I had each student make their own kindness picture and label it, like the children do in the book.  The teacher then displays this on a paper quilt that starts small and grows.  I have mine hanging in my office.  I try to avoid hanging work students do in counseling in the hallway.  I display student work done in classroom lessons in the hallway.  One teacher read the book and assigned doing the drawing for "homework" just like the teacher in the book. Here is a link to a plan https://character.org/lessons/lesson-plans

Kindness is Cool

This book is perfect for a kindergarten or first grade lesson on kindness.  An easy response to the book and discussion is to give each student a pre-cut heart (hopefully done with a die cut) where in kindergarten they would write and draw one act of kindness and in first could do up to 5.  If you do the 5s its easy to count by 5s to show how many acts of kindness that would make. It could be tied in to 100th day of school (which is today here) or the hearts could be displayed on a "Kindness Tree" bulletin board.

Kindness Book

This book is great to share with Pre-K through Grade 1 to encourage them to show kindness and express gratitude.  Today is Crossing Guards Day in our school division so the kids can thank the guard who helps keep the safe. I also encourage our students to learn the names of people like lunch room staff and bus drivers.  Greeting folks by name spreads kindness too.

Random Acts of Kindness Week

Our theme for classroom lessons is kindness this month.  I suggest you look at randomactsofkindness.org/lesson-plans These are well developed detailed plans for each grade K-5.  

Kindness Bulletin Board

We are using this iPad style bulletin board throughout the year. For this month we changed the background screen color and added a boarder. We laminate everything to reuse another year. We add real Apps to go along with our monthly theme. We have an ipad initiative in grade 2 so those students are alwasy asking about the Apps. For February we are focusing on KINDNESS in our class lessons. Of course for NSCW15 we but a sign at the bottom advertising this week.

Kindness

Our monthly theme in February for class lessons is kindness.  I use some of the great resources and ideas (lesson plans, free cut out downloads) from this website wearthecapekids.com

Character Counts Week

To focus students attention on the 6 pillars of character we are joining the nationwide celebration of "Character Counts Week." Today we are dressed in blue for trustworthiness, etc. On Wednesday we will wear orange for fairness and Unity Day.  On Friday we can wear either red or purple. Read more about charactercounts.org/getstarted/

Teaching Kindness

How can we teach children to be kind in a culture that glorifies meanness? Sue Stephensen uses positive psychology to promote kindness, humor, and laughter in  a school-wide approach.  Other schools like the one this article discusses teach kindness as part of their bullying prevention and character education programs preventing-bullying-through-kindness/ Another great resource for bringing kindness education into schools is randomactsofkindness.org I am incorporating some of the ideas in these resources into my bullying prevention inservice presentation for teachers during preservice week and in social/emotional classroom lessons.

No Longer a Dilly Dally by Carl Sommer

A book you might want to check out for a character education lesson on responsibility or for an academic lesson if No Longer a Dilly Dally.  There are several lessons available online that use this book
www.ncyi.org/ The book is also used for an activity in the book by Robin Zorn (ASCA Counselor of the Year) to teach good study habits. I bought Robin's book at ASCA and am planning to use it to develop a study habits group for grade 3 this coming school year. STEP UP to Better Grades (Space, Tools, Ending, Pay attention, Understanding directions and Practice) can be used for small groups or classroom lesson. It has a CD with parent letters, power points, and reproducible pages.It is available from youthlight.com

I love the theme "Celebrate Kindness" for this year's no name-calling week

Our school closed today because of bad weather.  It is a perfect day to plan activities for us to do January 20-12, 2014 to Celebrate Kindness while working to create safe school free of name-calling, bullying and bias. I want to focus on kind words instead of name-calling.