Digital Lessons for School Counselors - Savvy School Counselor

Hello, everyone! I’m already thinking about the new school year and what changes/additions I would like to introduce to my school counseling lessons. Today, I want to tell you about some lessons I’ve used over the years and about a couple of new resources I just received from Youthlight.

I use the SMART Guidance digital lessons regularly in my school counseling program. My students love the SMART Board interactions and the activities just add a boost to my lessons. I’ve had SMART Guidance Vol. 1 and SMART Guidance Vol. 2 for a few years now. They are both created by Will Moody and Diane Senn. I’ve used several of the lessons regularly such as Become Wise to Bully Behavior and Setting Goals for Success from volume 1 and It’s Your Choice: Understanding Choices and Consequences and The Three Keys to Success on Tests from volume 2. I use the lessons for classroom lessons, small groups, and individual counseling. They can be used on a digital white board or on your computer. Being a fan of the first two volumes, I was excited to see Volume 3 surface. When I inquired more about volume 3, I also discovered Mind Your Mindset! Now that I’ve gone through both CD-Roms, I want to share my thoughts about them with you.

One thing that’s different about SMART Guidance Vol. 3 is it has a theme throughout all 10 lessons. It’s also a solo project by Will Moody. It’s called The Code Breakers and the lessons are “10 essential skills for academic and personal success.” They are geared toward grades 3-8. Each lesson theme is about “breaking a code” in order to become successful at each skill. Each of the 10 lessons has a number somewhere during the lesson. The 10 numbers, once collected, give you a code to unlock the vault of games/activities. Here’s a little about each lesson:

Behavioral Code Switching – This lesson stresses being flexible, adaptable, aware, and observant in order to have success at school.
Body Image – This lesson stresses how students should understand, appreciate, care for, and celebrate their bodies for a positive body image.
Kid-Friendly Data and How to Use it – This lesson focuses on kid-friendly data and how to collect it, chart it, share it, and use it.
Stay Safe Online – This lesson teaches the importance of staying safe while online stressing stop and think, no unsafe sharing, no unsafe downloading, and ask an adult.
Grit – Grit shows your true strength of character. This lesson teaches the importance of a positive attitude, perseverance, a can-do mindset, and effort.
Understanding & Coping with Grief – This lesson teaches the importance of coping, a positive mindset, being courageous, and focusing on the future.
Manage Your Anger – This lesson helps kids learn to stop and chill, breathe and count, think it through, and make a choice.
Advanced Study Skills – Students learn how to become a study star by learning to focus, how to take two-column notes, and how to prepare and reflect.
Random Acts of Kindness -Kids will learn what thoughtful acts of kindness are with a focus on helping others, donating, using kind words, being a friend, and smiling.
Discover Your Strengths – Students learn to discover their strengths through knowledge, abilities, and talents.

Like volume 1 and 2, I found the various topics can be used for either classroom lessons, small groups, or individual sessions. Each lesson has interactive activities that you can access directly once you unlock the vault at the end. This would allow you to revisit an activity for review without having to access the actual lesson again.

The Mind Your Mindset CD-Rom is a great supplement to your growth mindset curriculum. This CD-Rom is also by Will Moody and comes with 10 lessons that build upon one another. (Although I think once you get through the first three lessons, you could pick and choose through the rest.) I love that these lessons incorporate mindset into popular school counseling topics such as bullying, goal-setting, problem solving, and good judgement. Here’s a little about each lesson:

An Introduction to Mindset – This lesson introduces students to the two kinds of mindsets: Positive, can-do mindset (growth mindset) and negative, cant-do mindset (fixed mindset).
Where Do Mindsets Come From? – This lesson teaches students that mindsets are built slowly over time based on beliefs we have about ourselves.
Developing a Positive, Can-Do Mindset -This lesson teaches students ways to change their thinking in order to keep their thoughts more positive.
Developing the Mindset of a Successful Learner – This lesson teaches the thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs students need to do well in school.
Perfecting Your Goal-Setting Mindset – This lesson helps students learn how to create SMART goals that can be accomplished through effort and practice.
The Role of Effort and Practice – This lesson helps students understand that it takes effort and practice to not only accomplish their goals, but to strengthen their can-do mindsets.
The Thoughts We Think, The Words We Say – In this lesson, students learn that the things they think and say can weaken their can-do mindset.
Your Mindset and Bullying – Students learn during this lesson how a positive, can-do mindset can help them when faced with various types of bullying situations.
Decisions: How Your Mindset Can Help! – This lesson helps students understand how a positive, can-do mindset can help them with making choices each day.
Conflicts and Problems-Use Your Mindset! – This lesson helps students learn how the power of mindset can help them problem solve and handle conflicts.

I am looking forward to incorporating these two new resources into my school counseling program next school year. I typically create an activity sheet or foldable for students to gather information on during these SMART lessons so they have information to keep afterwards. I’m sure I’ll do the same as necessary with these two new resources.

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