Kelso's Choices!

    
Conflict or disagreement is normal and often happens when children get together. However, hurtful words, gestures, or physical attack are unacceptable ways to deal with conflict and disagreement at school.  In the younger grades we have begun an exciting new conflict management program entitled Kelso’s Choice.  This program features a frog named Kelso, who teaches students to differentiate between small problems that they can solve and those that are potentially dangerous and serious.

Our goal at Lee Elementary is to teach students several positive ways to deal with these minor conflict situations.  To do this, we are asking students who have minor problems to try at least two of the following ideas:

1.      Go to another game or activity.

2.      Share and take turns.

3.      Respectfully talk it over and listen to each other.

4.      Walk away from the problem.

5.      Ignore the problem behavior.

6.      Tell the person to stop the problem behavior.

7.      Apologize.

8.      Make a deal or compromise.

9.      Cool off.

Additionally, we will be encouraging students to report serious and frightening problems to the nearest trusted adult.  By using this plan, we believe that our students will develop effective problem-solving skills that they can use again and again.  It will help them to deal with conflict in a positive manner and to make appropriate decisions.  Knowing what to do will help students reduce the stress and number of conflicts they have at school and at home.  We encourage you to become familiar with this program and use it in your home.  By working together, we can develop a healthy life skill for young people to use at home and at school.

In kindergarten we learned about each choice and then colored our own wheel:

In first grade we made our own Kelso puppets:

In second grade we filled in the choices we remembered then drew out examples of how we could use Kelso's choices:

We also watched this fun music video, "It's Your Choice Baby!"

 

4th Grade Bullying Survey

In fourth grade we've begun our unit on bullying.  Each year I spend time in each grade level teaching developmentally appropriate lessons to increase their depth of understanding about bullying.  I begin by having students fill out a quick True/False quiz to see their initial opinions of what bullying is:

We then go through the following charts, one that I adapted (download here) from Mrs. Sinclair's Counseling Blog to fit our students and district's definition of bullying & two from Savvy School Counselor's Blog.  I read different scenarios aloud to students and each table discusses which box it most accurately reflects.

After students have a clear understanding, we go back over their True/False survey to see how accurate they were and what they now have learned.  I finish by having them take an online google survey I created.  The survey asks a variety of questions about their experiences with bullying at our school.  My following visit we go through the results and discuss our findings.  We reflected on the results that most shocked us, did not surprise us, which behaviors were the most common types of bullying behaviors at our school and how we could make Lee Elementary a safer place.

Lee Roadrunners are Bucket Fillers!

My favorite books to read at the beginning of the year are Have You Filled a Bucket Today? and Bucket Filling A to Z, both by Carol McCloud.

Each of these books does a great job explaining how each of us has an invisible bucket that we carry around each day.  When others are kind to us, it fills up our buckets.  When we are kind to others, it fills up their buckets.  However, when we are unkind to each other it dips into a bucket.  Across the lower grade levels, I did a variety of lessons and activities to help students learn about bucket filling behaviors.

We sorted behaviors into Bucket Fillers and Bucket Dippers choices:

We drew pictures to show us being Bucket Fillers:

 
We made Bucket Filling acrostics using our names:

We sorted choices we make that show others we are Bucket Fillers or Bucket Dippers: