Self-Care a School Initiative

We all know that there is no tired like teacher tired! We have our own set of challenges. We go home worrying about the students in our class all while taking care of our own families! That is why we need to take time to take care of ourselves! We can not give the best of ourselves if we are not taking care of ourselves!

The counselor at our school came up with this great idea to start our own self-care initiative at our school and she asked me to join her! I thought I would share how we put this together and some of our resources to help you start your own!

First, we put together a self-care Facebook group for our staff. On this site we share a variety of topics! We left this as an open forum for everyone to share ideas. We also made a healthy lifestyle thread to help manage and find those ideas in one central location. 

Topic Ideas:

Healthy Lifestyle

Goals

Procrastination

Self-Esteem

Self-Care Strategies

Positive Self-Talk

Organizing (Purging Access Things)

Next, we are doing fitness assessments once a month and are offering a group workout right after school for 20 min. The fitness assessment consists of weight, measurements, 1-minute sit-up test, 1-minute push-up (or squats, I let them choose), and the pacer test. I just gave them a small paper to keep their results on and they could store these where they wanted (I included a link to it below).The group workout is just with an interval timer app. The workout is a one minute run followed by one minute of a strength move. We mix it up and use different materials from the P.E. closet. I teach group fitness, so this was simple to implement, but it really would be easy for anyone to implement! There are so many good workouts on Pinterest and ideas! You can mix it up however you see! Maybe Couch to 5k? DVD or YouTube workout in someones classroom?

Fitness Assessment Recording Sheet

Then, we plan on having monthly meetings after school. This is going to be kind of like a book club style where we are just sharing what we are doing. We also plan to start with an activity, either these or ones from my friend's book about self-care! We also plan to have outside experts come in to speak with our staff about topics! Our first meeting we will be having another counselor from a school who is trained specifically in yoga for teachers (so cool, right?!) to do a demo and discuss the benefits of yoga. People are often interested in coming to speak if they are able to promote their business

Community Experts to Utilize

Local Parks and Recreation - We are lucky that our city has a wellness specialist on staff and the city often wants to do these as a service to the community.

Gyms

Yoga Studios 

Nutrition Specialists

Talk with your staff see who they know or they would recommend!

To organize this we created a team drive on Google and a share Pinterest board. This has helped us to share ideas and to stay organized with the materials and articles we will share. Below I will link a copy of the resources we have collected so far (keep in mind many of these are for our specific town). 

Resources

Articles

These are all just ideas and it is a template for how we do it! Feel free to change up your plan however you would like! If you do start your own self-care initiative or have ideas on what we can add to ours feel free to leave a comment! 

  

Building Relationships with Brain Breaks

I want to start off by saying I love GoNoodle! It gives me and my students a mental break!  But, I do find myself checking emails, or if I am playing along I do not have much interactions with my students as I would like. They also do not have much interactions with each other during this time either. I have been thinking about how much this is a missed opportunity for myself to connect with my students and for them to connect with each other. I decided to revamp my classroom brain breaks! 

More Cooperative Learning!

 (Click here for a great article on cooperative learning.)

My district uses Kagan! I absolutely love it and wholeheartedly believe in the power of cooperative learning. I just recently picked up the book Silly Sports & Goofy Games!

This book gives over 200 different break break ideas! I have been slowly incorporating them into our brain break routine! One of my favorite that is super simple is Ten Count. I break the class in half and they attempt to basically count to ten without anyone in the group repeating the number. It is so fun to see their minds work and how they will be able to  work through this problem together. This book has tons of games from simple to more elaborate! It has definitely been a huge help!

I also like there quick Teambuilding downloads and Logic Line-Ups to use for brain breaks.

TPT also has a lot of free resources.

Introducing My Inner Jane Fonda

So, I actually have taught and still teach a variety of fitness classes. I thought it would be fun if I started leading my class in a fitness class for a brain break! I think it gives my students a moment to see another side of me (And for a brief moment they might even think I am as cool as Koo Koo Kangaroo!). We have been doing this for about three weeks now. They have started asking me can you teach us another dance or can we do kickboxing on our brain break. I really do think it has given us a new way to connect, and something fun we do together (I also get in a few extra steps too ☺)! 

I have taught kickboxing, Zumba, and yoga so I have a number of routines that I already know, but you can always do this too if you do not have this backgrounf. One girl I know does this too for her brain breaks, but she does them all sitting and they are super simple moves she just makes up as she goes.  Another thing is YouTube! You can learn any simple Zumba dance or pick up a super easy fitness routine online! 

Relaxation Music - If you want to lead them through some calming exercises like in yoga!

I hope you enjoyed this post! I know I have enjoyed doing this for my brain breaks! Have more ideas? Drop me a comment below!

Spreading Positivity

Just a little post that goes over the freebies we used!





I am so excited to start our shout out board!
We picked up the gold letters and green bins from the dollar tree.
The confetti background is wrapping paper for 5 Below.
The garland also came from 5 Below.


How adorable are these mini quotes!? We used them on the bulletin board and to place around the lounge. They would also be cute to just place on another teachers desk or mailbox! Click here for the small motivational quotes.



This freebie is so cute! It could be used as a bulletin board or just as quick cheerful note to give to a colleague! Click here for the shout out words in the board and paper print outs.



The other teacher who helped with this is so amazing! The table decorations in the teachers lounge that she put together are adorable.





I am so in love with these gold posters. These are placed in the different teacher bathrooms in the school.



 Click here for these posters.

Customizing Avatars on ClassDojo

Have you ever wanted to change the monster guys on ClassDojo? Below I have step by step instruction on how to do just that! I hope you find this helpful!

Click on the gear icon that is labeled settings. 

Click on Edit Class.

Click on the individual student.

Click on the monster icon.

Choose from the drop down menu. The first two are defaults from ClassDojo. The last two categories are ones I created. You will need to select "Create new set." 

Add a name for your set.

Click "Upload monsters"

Click "Choose files

Pick all the characters that you would like in this set. In case you don't know this trick, you can hit Ctrl while you click each character. This allows you to upload all of them at one time!

Hit "Upload"

Now you have a new set. Just select the character you want and save!

All done!

I hope you found this helpful! If you have any tips or tricks you would like to add please add them below! Also, don't hesitate if you have any questions! Thanks!

My First Year Using Ron Clark's Essential 55

Last summer was the first time I read Ron Clark's The Essential 55. It, of course, was amazing. I knew instantly I wanted to incorporate this ideology into my classroom, but implementing it was a little intimidating to say the least! I was thinking "How am I going to implement and stay consistent with 55 rules, while learning about 22 new friends, and still function during the first week of school?" So, I decided to not introduce all 55 rules last year. Instead, I picked 10 to introduce. In this post I will go through the 10 rules I introduced and go over what worked and what didn't! Also, I'll go over how it impacted my class for the better! I hope this helps some of you wanting to implement this in your classroom as well!