OES Guidance Newsletter
April 2016
Welcome Back from Spring Break!!
We would like to share an article with the staff. The article is on Empathy. We've taught this lesson in Guidance but we want to make sure that all the staff is continuing to teach empathy in the classrooms. A lot of districts and schools focus on academic and skills. Academics and skills are believed to be the only things to raise academic achievements and test scores. However, a study was done and it was found that modeling and fostering empathy has been known to proven to raise academic achievement (Wilson, 2016). There are several different ways in which classroom teachers can teach empathy to their students. One way to do this is to using different books that teach about empathy either directly or indirectly, building empathy through play, or create a jigsaw classroom (Wilson ,2016). A jigsaw classroom is one in which the students are divided into groups but the groups consists of students on different achievement levels (Wilson, 2016).
If you would like to read this article, a link is below.
Wilson, Ruth. (2016). Empathy for the 'A.' Teaching Tolerance, Spring 2016(52), 53-55. http://www.tolerance.org/sites/default/files/TeachingToleranceMagazineIssue52.pdf
What's Going on This Month?
Guidance Lessons
Good Teamwork and Bad Teamwork
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUXdrl9ch_Q
The Power of Teamwork
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9j3-ghRjBs
Ohio State Marching Band Disney Show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUXdrl9ch_Q
The next topic we covered was Earth Day. We had the students watch "Go Green with Disney's Timon and Pumbaa". It talked about how to reduce, reuse, and recycle and the importance of doing those things to help and keep the earth alive. We had grades 3-5 complete a writing prompt about Earth Day. Two examples of those are below. Grades K-2 did a recycling sort and then colored a coloring sheet on Earth Day.
Month of the Military Child
The winners of the essay writing were:
Jeffrey Malave (Mrs. Fisher's class)
Breanna Walsh (Mrs. Fisher's class)
Zoe Ewing (Ms. Randall's class)
Jasmine Lee (Ms. Randall's class)
The winners of the drawings were:
Ryden McGothen (Ms. Kator's class)
Alyssa Weldon (Mrs. Hadley's class)
As a school, we wore purple on April 8 and the "Cape Fear River Ramblers", an Army jazz band, performed at our school on April 8 as well.