School Counselor Blog

Last month I hosted a webinar for the American School Counselor Association Webinar Series. I hosted  Promote Self-Care to Your School Community where I shared fun, creative, and practical ways you can promote self-care at your school.  The webinar is now available for on-demand viewing on the ASCA website for ASCA Members.  🎬 Watch the full webinar here:  https://videos.schoolcounselor.org/promote-self-care-to-your-school-community/ (Free to ASCA Members) This Promote Self-Care to Your School Community   ASCA webinar was based on an article I wrote for t he January/February 2025 issue of   ASCA School Counselor  Magazine , Tools for Self-Care . I wrote a blog post that includes links and resources for many of the initiatives mentioned in this  Tools for Self-Care   article and the  Promote Self-Care to Your School Community   ASCA webinar. You can find the link to the blog post here:  https://www.schcounselor.com/2025/01/f...

Need a purrrfect way to de-stress after state testing? I got you! I literally lived my best life this week when we hosted Therapy Cats from a local therapy pet volunteer organization. It is all part of De-Stress After the Test, a series of stress-free activities to help students unwind and recharge after state testing. Some other activities that we're hosting include:  🧘🏼‍♀️ Yoga 🃏 Cards & Board Games 🐶 Therapy Dogs 😻 Therapy Cats 🎮 Esports 🥳 Dance Party I wrote a whole blog post about how you can implement this at your school. Check it out here: https://bit.ly/scdestress But wait, there’s more! I will be hosting an ASCA Webinar on this topic, May 20th at 11:00am: Promote Self-Care to Your School Community. A f ull registration link is available here: https://members.schoolcounselor.org/event-details?id=ba470317-780a-f011-a4de-6045bd866234 What questions do you have?! Connect with Danielle! If you have questions, connect with me on on  Instagram ,  Faceboo...

I am excited to share that an article I wrote,  Tools for Self-Care ,  is featured in the January/February 2025 issue of ASCA School Counselor Magazine ! This issue highlights the importance of school counselor and student mental health. In   Tools for Self-Care , I provide practical ways to promote, model, and encourage self-care to  students, educators,  and graduate students! ASCA Members can read the article online here:  Tools for Self-Care . You can also find Tools for Self-Care  in the January/February 2025 issue of ASCA School Counselor Magazine starting on page 30. Below are links to initiatives I mentioned in the article. 12 Days of Self-Care Check out this  12 Days of Self-Care  post for information about how I facilitated 12 Days of Self-Care at my school. This was an event leading up to winter break, but you could use the activity ideas and "self-care selfies" other times during the school year to promote, model, and encoura...

The days leading up to winter break can be stressful! To help students and staff cope with the stress of the season, the Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS) team at my school hosts a daily self-care challenge for the 12 days leading up to winter break. Each day, students and staff can take a selfie featuring them doing the daily self-care prompt. Students and staff who submit a self-care selfie, will be entered in the weekly prize drawing.  Find some examples of prizes here:  12 Days of Self-Care Prizes .   This year the challenge starts on Thursday, December 5th and continues through Friday, December 20th.  I am sharing everything you need to host this challenge at your own school! Students and staff will submit their selfies using a Google Form. I made a template of the form I am using so that you can use it too! You can access it here: TEMPLATE FOR SELF-CARE SELFIE FORM   I created a slideshow on Canva to share the daily prompt with students and...

For our February Inservice, school counselors in my district were charged with hosting a social-emotional wellness session for teachers in our school buildings. My co-counselor and I decided to do something experiential. We wanted teachers to experience various self-care activities; not just talk about them. We decided to call this event a “Self-Care Fair” since teachers would have the option of trying different activities during the event. Overview of the Self-Care Fair For our Self-Care Fair, we had a two-hour block of time where we hosted six, twenty-minute sessions. We had multiple activities to choose from for each time-slot. Teachers were able to select which activities they wanted to attend. Our goal was for teachers to have a choice about what they participated in for the day. We chose activities that would be within teachers’ comfort zones. We wanted it to bel an enjoyable, self-care opportunity, not something stressful!  Self-Care Activities We hosted the following sessio...

The days leading up to winter break can be stressful! To help students and staff cope with the stress of the season, the Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS) team at my school is hosting a daily self-care challenge for the 12 days leading up to winter break. Each day, students and staff can take a selfie featuring them doing the daily self-care prompt. Students and staff who submit a self-care selfie, will be entered in the daily prize drawing for that prompt.   The challenge starts on Wednesday, December 7th and continues through Thursday, December 22nd.  I am sharing everything you need to host this challenge at your own school! Students and staff will submit their selfies using a Google Form. I made a template of the form I am using so that you can use it too! You can access it here: TEMPLATE FOR SELF-CARE SELFIE FORM   I created a slideshow on Canva to share the daily prompt with students and staff on the closed circuit TVs. I made a version that you can ...

In January I participated in a Flexible Professional Development. Our district sent out different webinars and trainings we could attend virtually. We were able to pick and choose which webinars and trainings we wanted to attend. One of the webinars I chose was The Value of Educator Self-Care by Learning for Justice (Formerly Teaching Tolerance). The webinar had so much valuable information. One of the things that stuck out most to me was a self-care chart one of the leaders of the webinar, Geneviève DeBose, shared . Geneviève DeBose created a large chart on wrapping paper to display things she could do to practice self-care. Geneviève DeBose wrote a post about the Self-Care Practices Chart she made,  Deepening a Practice of Self-Care .  She was inspired to create the Self-Care Practices Chart after she saw another educator share a Self-Care Bingo. I love this visual reminder to practice self-care. I immediately began thinking about how I could use this in my work with s...