Oops where did #tbt go? I wanted to share this Girls Group post from the old blog. I just wrapped this group and am hoping to gather permission from parents to post the awesome video my girls made about relational aggression after finishing the book. In the meantime, here's what we did in our book club:
Oh, girl drama. We've lived it and now sometimes we live surrounded by it. If you're a school counselor, you spend at least a portion of every day dealing with girl drama. This is such a difficult topic to manage. Some days, I can remember that this is preparing our young girls for all the relationships that they will have as adolescents and adults. Other days, I just want to scream "Get over it! You'll be friends tomorrow!" Just kidding. Sort of.
While I have certainly implemented many mediation and conflict resolution interventions, I was looking for something that would teach new relationship skills and allow for real change. Enter the book club! My good friend, Angela Poovey, over at Life on the Fly, really introduced me to the book club concept and I love it.
I used the book The Girls by Amy Goldman Koss. In this group, we read a portion of the book and discuss the implications of the selection. We begin each lesson with a youtube video that relates to what we read previously. I put all the videos on a playlist here.
To begin, I assigned each girl in the group a character. They each received a piece of paper with the character's name on top and two columns: What they think, What others think. Here they wrote the impressions their character had about the other girls and what the other girls thought about their character. It was really great to see each student grab their pen and add to their paper while I was reading. I think that the character pages helped the girls in the group to really connect to the characters and relate to the story. It also kept them paying attention!
To end the group, we used a technique that I picked up doing the Bullying Specialist professional development through ASCA. In this technique, I empowered each of the girls to use resources to research ways to handle a fictitious problem. In my district, we use google docs. I created a google doc with different bullying resources and assigned one to each student. Outside of group, they researched their resource and input ideas for how to handle our fictitious problem. We then discussed their resources and ideas in the group.
You can check out all the lesson plans below (may not be visible on mobile). I hope that you find it helpful!
PS - Teachers LOVE book clubs because they incorporate reading skills and using resources to research a problem is so Common Core :) Have fun!
Oh, girl drama. We've lived it and now sometimes we live surrounded by it. If you're a school counselor, you spend at least a portion of every day dealing with girl drama. This is such a difficult topic to manage. Some days, I can remember that this is preparing our young girls for all the relationships that they will have as adolescents and adults. Other days, I just want to scream "Get over it! You'll be friends tomorrow!" Just kidding. Sort of.
While I have certainly implemented many mediation and conflict resolution interventions, I was looking for something that would teach new relationship skills and allow for real change. Enter the book club! My good friend, Angela Poovey, over at Life on the Fly, really introduced me to the book club concept and I love it.
I used the book The Girls by Amy Goldman Koss. In this group, we read a portion of the book and discuss the implications of the selection. We begin each lesson with a youtube video that relates to what we read previously. I put all the videos on a playlist here.
To begin, I assigned each girl in the group a character. They each received a piece of paper with the character's name on top and two columns: What they think, What others think. Here they wrote the impressions their character had about the other girls and what the other girls thought about their character. It was really great to see each student grab their pen and add to their paper while I was reading. I think that the character pages helped the girls in the group to really connect to the characters and relate to the story. It also kept them paying attention!
To end the group, we used a technique that I picked up doing the Bullying Specialist professional development through ASCA. In this technique, I empowered each of the girls to use resources to research ways to handle a fictitious problem. In my district, we use google docs. I created a google doc with different bullying resources and assigned one to each student. Outside of group, they researched their resource and input ideas for how to handle our fictitious problem. We then discussed their resources and ideas in the group.
You can check out all the lesson plans below (may not be visible on mobile). I hope that you find it helpful!
PS - Teachers LOVE book clubs because they incorporate reading skills and using resources to research a problem is so Common Core :) Have fun!
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