My First Senior Leader Release Day

I know, cheesy title! But I want to share and that heading seems as good as any.
I originally had my release day set for next week, but Jill wasn't available so I had to change it to today. It is too early in the term / year, to begin observations. I mentioned this to Tanya and she said I was welcome to visit her room, so I did! I was only looking at the relationships, whether or not children were engaged in what they were doing, how they were responding etc, not what they were learning. But it was the first time I'd actually observed Play Based Learning in a junior classroom properly. I gained some new knowledge and understandings myself, and I can see why the teachers and children love it! Anyway, observation notes are superb, written up and shared on google drive. That sounds wrong. My notes aren't superb. Tanya's relationship with her class is!
I met with our wonderful RTLB after morning tea. We talked about emotion coaching and he presented me with a book which I had to speed read (I usually take a while and read every. single. word) but have to have the book back tomorrow because of Jury Duty on Monday. This stresses me out to the point of ridiculousness. I dread getting Jury summons letters, they make my heart beat out of order just thinking about them. I hope I'm not selected. Seriously, it causes me extreme anxiety.
So anyway, I read the book like really fast. And it is definitely something we could implement in our school. RTLB said if I was keen we could organise a staff meeting and get all of the staff on board. It fits beautifully with our whole school focus on respect, it also fits with restorative practice, and appears to be a valuable tool for emotion coaching. So I'm going to say YES! I think we should all do it. It is straightforward, designed as a sequence of 18 lessons that help children identify self regulation zones, teaches the language needed to express emotions, discover triggers, understand different perspectives and find tools, techniques and strategies to help them get back into a happy/calm place. (the green zone!) That, along with a whole lot of other important things, but I'm not going to go into it too much right now. I just know that it fits with our school and what we do and I can see how it would be a valuable tool.

I need to put together a small list of students to try out some art therapy with. I've not looked into it properly yet. I was checking things out online between midnight and 1am after husband's phone went off in the middle of the night. We woke up and since it was St Valentines Day we decided to exchange gifts, have a cup of fruit tea, then I was wide awake so thought I'd look into art therapy for children. So much info online, but I reckon it would be quite nice to do the occasional small group art session, where we could just talk while we expressed ourselves through visual art. I do need to look into this further before I get all carried away. Two post in two days, gosh I'm good sometimes!