Hallway Expectation Follow Up

Our Hallway Expectation assemblies yesterday to kick-off the new year with good hallway behavior were a success! The students were so well behaved in our hallways today. Some of the students have needed to be re-taught the skill already, but the staff members have been vigilant about re-teaching the skill. Way to go!

Today I made a movie with our flip camera showing some of our 3rd grade students exhibiting the Pillar Pride hallway behavior. If you have not used a flip camera in your guidance program yet - you should! They are so simple to use, and the students love seeing themselves on t.v. as "moviestars"!

In our video, the 3rd grade students are describing how they show each of the Character Counts! pillars as they walk through the hallway. They then demonstrate walking through the hallway using the Pillar Pride expectations. They did great! I sent the video to all of our teachers so they can show it on their smartboards tomorrow morning and review. I am also uploading it to my counseling website and sending the link in an email to parents so they can see the hard work we are doing, and reinforce at home too!

Do any of you use a flip camera in your guidance programs? How do you use it? I would love to get some new ideas!

The Character and Career Connection

To end out the year in our guidance curriculum this year, our third grade class is learning about how careers and good character are connected. The curriculum that I am using for our third grade careers unit is The Character and Career Connection by Amy R. Murray, M.Ed.

Each lesson in the curriculum is based around a character trait. Each lesson begins with a story about the character trait, includes discussion questions to follow the reading with, and then an activity related to good character. For example for the pillar of Responsibility, students read Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss. After reading and discussing the book, the students play a game where they draw a card with a responsibility listed on the card. The students must guess what job I am describing based on the responsibility.

Good Character is something that we emphasize all year, and this curriculum is a great way to bring both careers and good character together. The character traits are not the Character Counts traits, but most of the traits in the book can be adapted to meet any type of Character Education program. The book has other great ideas too, such as how to start a "Career Day" or "Vehicle Day" at your school, and a really neat idea about how to honor students who have good character. In the back of the book are also tip sheets to send home to parents as each character trait is studied.

Here are some other resources you can pull from to connect careers with good character:

World-Of-Work Map, Career Clusters, and Career Areas

Career Wordsearch

After Hours Inspirational Stories

The Quote Garden

Tropical Treat Day!

Wow, have I been busy this week! Today is a special day at our school, it is Tropical Treat Day! All week I have been busy planning with the student council and the teachers in our character committee this school-wide activity that focuses on the Character Counts pillar of Caring.

On Tropical Treat Day, our school celebrates all of the acts of caring our school has done this month. In the guidance curriculum for 3-5 grade, we have been focusing on showing that we care about our schoolwork. At the beginning of the month, we learned about ways to show that we care about doing our best on the ITBS with the Test Busters curriculum, and the last two weeks we have been learning about good study habits and classroom behavior that show that you care about your school work. The students have been working hard to do their best, get their assignments in on time, and showing that they care about their school work!

We also held a fundraiser this month to raise money for an orphanage in Haiti to show caring towards people put in this unfortunate situation. Other caring activities during the month have included writing thank you notes to people who have "filled a bucket" in 3rd grade, writing thank you letters to teachers and staff members who have made a difference in 4th grade, and cleaning up the planters uptown to get our community ready for spring in 5th grade. Tropical Treat Day is a culminating activity that celebrate all of these acts of caring our students have done throughout the month of February, both inside and outside the classroom.

The students and staff at our school have all donned their best 'Tropical' attire to celebrate today, and in the afternoon we will all head over to the gym to play some games and enjoy some treats! The teachers have set up stations in the gym where students can play different tropical themed games, and there is also a station where they can get a tropical treat! For our tropical treat, we bought a few cases of freeze pops - an economical but delicious tropical treat! Our student council has been working hard this week to decorate the gym with help from our elementary art club as well.

Looking forward to a great Tropical Treat Day!

Hearts for Haiti

For a school-wide service activity during the month of February while we are studying the Character Counts pillar of caring, the 4th and 5th grade students at our school are hosting a fundraiser to raise money to send to orphans in Haiti. Each day after school, our student council walks around the building selling heart-shaped suckers for 50 cents a piece. We got the suckers at the Dollar Store for an extremely good price, so any money raised off the sale of the suckers is purely profit.

It is so wonderful to see how caring and generous our students really are. Many students have used their allowance money, or money they were saving for a toy or a movie to donate to Haiti. One student donated five dollars and asked for only one sucker - he said the rest could be a donation. How big the hearts of these 4th and 5th grade students are!

The fundraiser was easy to put together, and didn't take a great deal of time or money. It was a great school wide activity to support the Character Counts Pillar of Caring. At the end of the month we are going to announce how much money we have raised, and will celebrate acts of caring by having a Caring Cruise party.