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Social Emotional Learning Corner
Trimester 2 Edition
January is "Get Organized" Month
January is the perfect time to Get Organized! Many students and parents start off strong with their organizational skills but they seem to fizzle throughout the fall. January is always a second chance to re-organize! As you have seen over the past few months or even past few years, the school environment changes in the middle years. Instead of loads of structure and guidance, as your child had in elementary school, students are expected to manage more of their life on their own. At the same time, the students themselves are changing. They are less motivated to please adults and more motivated to impress peers. As they search for their own identities, the social scene becomes more important. It is a confusing time for students , but with the right support, they can thrive!
When it comes to middle school organization the best thing parents and teachers can do is keep it simple. Follow these rules to help your child get the most out of these critical years — building independence and self-esteem along the way.
What Parents Can Do
GIVE YOUR CHILD A PLANNER. Make sure your child has a thin, spiral-bound planner. The format inside should let him see a full week at a glance, and should also include a monthly calendar. The right planner is the first step toward keeping track of due dates and appointments. There is too much going on in middle school to keep it all in your head! A planner works only if it’s used every day. Discuss the times throughout the day when she should be using the planner, and check it each evening. Consider providing a reward or incentive to help get her started. It is a very important skill to teach your child to REVERSE PLAN. This means plugging in dates of future long-term projects or tests into their planner and working backwards to plug in shorter study sessions or work sessions in days leading up to the due date. Students often know when test dates are but leave all the studying until the last minute. Getting into the habit of chunking studying into 15-20 minute blocks each day reduces stress and increases retention of content.
TAKE TWO — That is two minutes to organize papers every day. As your child begins homework each evening, have him take the first two minutes to clean papers out of his bag and organize them into folders. This simple habit helps students transition into doing homework.
ESTABLISH A HOME PAPER STATION. When folders get full, students need to clean them out. But they should hold onto returned notes and assignments; these become valuable study guides.
AVOID MORNING MAYHEM. Have your child pack his bag every night, using his planner to verify that nothing is left out. Your child should be charging his/her Chromebook nightly and packing and bringing a fully charged device to school each day. Being prepared ahead of time, makes for a stress-free morning with a feeling that they are prepared to have a successful day ahead!
What Teachers Can Do
USE MINIMAL SUPPLIES. The worst thing to do to a student is to saddle him/her with a bunch of tools to manage and organize. Let students combine all their folders and notebooks into one binder. Inside the binder, they can organize their papers and notes by subject, using vinyl binder folders.
MAKE PLANNERS MANDATORY. Tracking due dates and test dates is key to success in school. Everyone’s memory fails sometimes, students with have the most to gain by writing things down, even if it is posted in Aspen or Google Classroom. They must develop the habit of recording their assignments and important dates. Discuss transition points (switching classes or FAST), the times throughout the day when students should use their planners. Encourage them to use their planners; make it part of their grade.
DO BAG CHECKS. Randomly check book bags for extra credit. Award points for bags with no loose papers, no trash, and assignments in folders.
DO LOCKER CHECKS. Check lockers during homeroom. Make sure all trash is removed.
DO NOTEBOOK/BINDER CHECKS. Note-taking is a new skill to our 6th graders. To be frank, some students, especially those with executive function weaknesses, don't even know where to begin taking notes. I often see students open their notebook on random pages and just start writing! Teachers, especially in 6th grade, will need to model and guide this skill with students. Grading students on notebook/binder organization is another great way to support and encourage students to take notes and store them in an organized fashion. Developing these habits in middle school will be a life-long skill that students will carry with them throughout high school and beyond.
A friendly reminder to all, one of the best ways to foster organization in children is to model good habits! Happy Organizing!
Books That You May Find Helpful When Organizing Your Teen
Organizing from the Inside Out for Teenagers: The Foolproof System for Organizing Your Room, Your Time, and Your Life
Where's My Stuff?: The Ultimate Teen Organizing Guide
Smart but Scattered Teens: The "Executive Skills" Program for Helping Teens Reach Their Potential
RULER is an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning (SEL).
Through training in the RULER approach, teachers and leaders learn the skills to create and sustain a positive emotional climate, as well as support individual development of emotion skills for students and adults. You might remember in our last newsletter we introduced to you tool #1-The Charter. The Charter is a collaborative document that helps schools (and homes) establish supportive and productive learning environments. ... Together, the community describes how they want to feel at school, the behaviors that foster those feelings, and guidelines for preventing and managing unwanted feelings and conflict. All clusters at BMS have created a Charter and are using it as an anchor in their daily practice. This trimester, the BMS community is bringing Tool #2-The Mood Meter, into daily practice.
Tool #2: The Mood Meter
The Mood Meter is the foundational tool for building the RULER skills. It is the second Anchor Tool introduced to students, after the Charter. It is a tool for building self-awareness and social awareness.
The Mood Meter has two axes. The X-axis is pleasantness: your subjective, private mental experience. The X-axis goes from -5, the most unpleasant you have ever felt, to neutral in the middle, all the way to +5, the most pleasant you have ever felt. The Y-axis is energy: how much physical energy is running through your body. The Y-axis goes from -5, when you have extremely low energy, are lethargic, asleep even, to neutral in the middle, all the way to +5, the most energetic you have ever felt. The two axes cross to form four quadrants, and each has a color: red, blue, green, and yellow.
R: Where are you on the Mood Meter?
U: What is causing you to feel this way?
L: What word best describes your feeling?
E: How are you expressing this feeling? Are you comfortable expressing? What are the urges that these feeling words are encouraging you to want to do?
R: How do you want to feel? What strategy will you use to stay or shift? Are these urges on track to your best self goals?
Family Mood Meter Activity
1. As you sit down with your family to watch your favorite Netflix show, watch a good movie, or read a book together, decide on one character to focus on.
2. Pay attention to the emotions the character feels and displays.
3. Discuss the following questions together...
-What were the main events of the story?
-How did the character influence or respond to these events?
-What do you believe were the beliefs or emotions that drove the character's behavior?
-What are 8 different emotions you think the character felt? Plot on the mood meter.
-Which emotions were serving the character's goals, and which may have been getting in the way of the character's goals?
-Did the character regulate or not regulate their emotions at key moments? If that had been different might the story have had a different ending?
-Can you think of an example of how a skillful self-regulation strategy could have shifted the story?
Some SEL Books Your Middle Schooler May Enjoy!
The Seventh Most Important Thing by Shelley Pearsall
Arthur is given a rickety shopping cart and a list of the Seven Most Important Things: glass bottles, foil, cardboard, pieces of wood, lightbulbs, coffee cans, and mirrors. He can’t believe it—is he really supposed to rummage through people’s trash? But it isn’t long before Arthur realizes there’s more to the Junk Man than meets the eye, and the “trash” he’s collecting is being transformed into something more precious than anyone could imagine. . . .
Shelley Pearsall has crafted an affecting and redemptive novel about discovering what shines within us all, even when life seems full of darkness. A Story of loss and grief and discovering the light on the other side.
OCD Daniel By Wesley King
From the author of Incredible Space Raiders from Space! comes a brand-new coming-of-age story about a boy whose life revolves around hiding his obsessive compulsive disorder—until he gets a mysterious note that changes everything.
Daniel is the back-up punter for the Erie Hills Elephants. Which really means he’s the water boy. He spends football practice perfectly arranging water cups—and hoping no one notices. Actually, he spends most of his time hoping no one notices his strange habits—he calls them Zaps: avoiding writing the number four, for example, or flipping a light switch on and off dozens of times over. He hopes no one notices that he’s crazy, especially his best friend Max, and Raya, the prettiest girl in school. His life gets weirder when another girl at school, who is unkindly nicknamed Psycho Sara, notices him for the first time. She doesn’t just notice him: she seems to peer through him.
Then Daniel gets a note: “I need your help,” it says, signed, Fellow Star Child—whatever that means. And suddenly Daniel, a total no one at school, is swept up in a mystery that might change everything for him.
With great voice and grand adventure, this book is about feeling different and finding those who understand.
Small as an Elephant by Jennifer Richard Jacobson
Ever since Jack can remember, his mom has been unpredictable, sometimes loving and fun, other times caught in a whirlwind of energy and “spinning” wildly until it’s over. But now she is gone, leaving him all alone on a campsite in Maine. Can he find his way back to Boston before the authorities realize what happened? With nothing but a small toy elephant to keep him company, Jack begins a journey that will test his wits and his loyalties — and his trust that he may be part of a larger herd after all.
"A deeply perceptive look at the universal fear of abandonment." — Booklist (starred review)
January 2020-RISAS Parent Newsletter- New Year, New Decade, New Parenting Opportunities
This month's newsletter focuses on opportunities to connect with your child. Research has shown when a child feels more connected to their family, their chances of engaging in high risk behavior decreases.
Also, myself and the East Bay Youth Tobacco Council will be conducting a presentation about Vaping at the next BMS PTO Meeting on 1/27 at 7pm.
Thank you and Happy New Year!!
Katie Hamel, BMS Student Assistance Counselor
Please click on the link below to read the RISAS Newsletter
https://mailchi.mp/db19516b70b1/risas-parent-newsletter-happy-new-yearSave The Date---The BMS PTO is Hosting a SCREENAGERS NEXT CHAPTER viewing---January 14---7pm
Screenagers NEXT Chapter: Uncovering Skills for Stress Resilience
From the director of SCREENAGERS: Growing Up in the Digital Age comes Screenagers NEXT CHAPTER: Uncovering Skills for Stress Resilience and is about helping young people thrive in our screen and stress-filled world.
Filmmaker and physician Delaney Ruston uses a personal lens and professional eye to help us all flip the script on stress, anxiety, and depression. We follow Delaney as she finds herself at a loss on how to help her own teens as they struggle with their emotional wellbeing. Ruston sets out to understand these challenges in our current screen-filled society, and how we as parents and schools empower teens to overcome mental health challenges and build emotional agility, communication savvy, and stress resilience.
We witness Delaney as she finds her way from ineffective parenting to much-improved strategies. We follow other personal stories of families from an array of backgrounds with a spectrum of emotional challenges. We also observe approaches in schools that provide strategies relevant beyond the classroom setting. Interwoven into the stories are surprising insights from brain researchers, psychologists, and thought-leaders that reveal evidence-based ways to support mental wellness among our youth.
The impact of social media and other screen time is incorporated in all the topics raised Screenagers NEXT CHAPTER, how it may be impacting our teen’s mental health, and what we can do to help foster youth in the face of struggles.
Hope to see you there!
7th Grade School Counselor-Stephanie Nary Narys@barringtonschools.org
8th Grade School Counselor-Jaime Poirier Poirierj@barringtonschools.org
School Psychologist- Mary Ellen Tillotson Tillotsonm@barringtonschools.org
Clinical Social Worker-Courtney Canario Canarioc@barringtonschools.org
Student Assistance Counselor-Katie Hamel Hamelk@barringtonschools.org
Guidance Secretaries:
Kathy Bulman 401.247.3160 Bulmank@barringtonschools.org
Kelly Nelson 401.247.3160 Nelsonk@barringtonschools.org