National School Psychology Awareness Week

National School Psychology Awareness Week:

Helping Students, Staff and Families Know Their Own Strengths!

 (Adapted from the National Association of School Psychologist’s parent resources.)

Dear Families,

Supportive learning environments help children discover their individual strengths, share them, and celebrate them across all areas of learning and throughout the school community. Tapping into individual and collective strengths can build children’s resiliency and ability to meet challenges successfully. This capacity is essential to success in school and life.

School psychologists are in a unique role to facilitate this process at school. We work directly with students providing assessments, leading individual and group skill development sessions, consulting and collaborating with teachers, counselors, aides, administrators, and parents. We also serve on school problem solving and leadership teams, analyzing and explaining educational data, developing classroom accommodations and modifications, and meeting with parents and community members.

Helping our students to identify their interests, passions, and accomplishments is why Pine Glen is participating in national School Psychology Awareness Week, November 12–16, 2012. The theme is “Know Your Own Strengths. Discover Them. Share Them. Celebrate Them.” While school staff creates many activities to promote awareness, you too as parents or guardians can help build and celebrate your children’s individual strengths! For example, you can:

·      Encourage your children’s individual strengths. Explore how they might differ from those of their siblings or classmates and why they can make a difference.

·      Have family discussions celebrating each other’s strengths. No one is good at everything, but everyone is good at something. Be sure to highlight individual strengths across all family members; everyone’s strengths may be different, but they are all important to share.

·      Pay it forward. Challenge your children to use their strengths to help someone this week, such as teaching a friend to play a sport or helping a classmate with a project.

As part of School Psychology Awareness week, we at Pine Glen are “weighing” our strengths. If you and your child are interested in contributing to our Pine Glen Garden Strength weigh in, full instructions are attached.

I look forward to working with all the students this year and hope to see the numbers on our strength scale growing.

Sincerely,

Lea Garneau, M.Ed., Ed.S., NCSP

School Psychologist

Pine Glen Elementary School

781-505-1128

lgarneau@bpsk12.org

http://pineglenschoolpsych.blogspot.com/