Classroom guidance lessons can be tricky. You are not in each classroom frequently enough to develop consistent routines; every classroom has its own dynamic, and your lessons might be, well, a bit boring. Check out tips from four Confident Counselors about how they spice up their classroom guidance lessons.
Get Them Moving
To spice up classroom guidance lessons, I try to find ways to get students out of their seats, let them move, and turn our lesson topics into interactive games.
Any time I see versatile supplies like cones or buckets on sale, I grab those to turn into counseling games. Using supplies like this, pretty much any question-and-answer activity can be turned into a relay!
We do a lot of centers as well. Centers help students practice cooperation skills while completing time-limited activities. I find that time-limited centers lead to higher engagement and more on-task behavior during skill practice!
Use Videos
I get bored easily, especially doing the same lesson over and over again. To keep my sanity, I have to include a variety of elements to break up the lesson.
I almost always start with a quick video clip on the day's topic to hook the students. Next, I usually show a PowerPoint (always with sounds and clipart) that often includes links to other short video clips interspersed with the text. I always include some sort of craft or mindful coloring activity that students can do either individually or in a group after our discussion.
Flipbooks are one of my favorite crafts and can be sent home as a reminder of the lesson. It never hurts to splash in some spa music while they are working independently. I have found that this calms them and is an excellent way to keep everyone on task. The music also helps with classroom management because I use it as a reward for good behavior.
Behavior Cards & Silly Outfits
Towards the second half of the year, students can start to check out a bit, and behaviors can become harder to control. I like to spice up my lessons and manage behavior with behavior cards. These cards help me manage behaviors and motivate and compliment students who are meeting my expectations. I switch them out every month to help with student engagement.
I also like to spice up lessons by incorporating lots of hands-on activities, YouTube videos, and music that ties into the skills I am teaching.
I am also known for wearing silly outfits that match the story I am reading, or a superhero cape to help catch and hold students’ attention.
Books & Treats
I love guidance lessons and have a lot of fun spicing them up with healthy treats and bibliotherapy. I bring snacks like veggie chips or fruit chews in a container and then let students take a treat if they raise their hand to answer a question or follow a class rule. This really makes them enjoy my visits and keeps them super-engaged during the guidance lesson.
I also try to always bring books related to the SEL or college/career topic we are learning. As an intro or closing, I read a few pages or a chapter of the book aloud. They love it! This quarter, I am alternating between reading them passages from Letters to a Bullied Girl and Vicious. Even though I have big kids up to age 15, I also read to them from picture books such as the fabulous Salt in His Shoes; in fact, I have an entire stress-management guidance lesson created around this fabulous growth-mindset-themed book about Michael Jordan, written by his mother.
How do you make your classroom guidance lessons engaging?
Share your tips for making it work below!
When I’m doing lessons in elementary I try to turn camp games into games we can play during the lesson. So when I teach about emotions and how different people can react in different ways to the same situation, I play 4 corners. Each corner is an emotion and the students go to the corner that’s the emotion they would feel in a scenario I give. We’ve also played red light-green light using helpful and unhelpful thoughts. It gets the kids up and moving and has them really think about the concepts I’m teaching and apply them to their own lives.