Oh, Open House! The scramble to get ready, the shaking of what seems like a million hands, the graceful (you hope) redirection of parent disclosures that are better saved for a private meeting time, the insights gained from seeing interactions between kids and their parents, the happy reunions with former students who are back for a visit with their younger siblings (or, as is now my surreal reality, with their children), and the bleary-eyed stumble home after a 12+ hour day at school. Open House is always a wonderful event, but it’s exhausting!
This year, inspired by lots of great Open House ideas from other counselors’ blogs, I suggested to my co-counselor that we try something different. She’s new herself, so it’s all new to her, and she said it sounded like a great idea. (More on this later!)
In previous years we started by greeting people in the lobby, and then, once the initial rush of arrivals was over, went classroom to classroom to meet families where they spend most of their Open House time. It was a great way to have some brief conversation in a relatively quiet setting, but inevitably we would miss some families. This year we wanted to find a way to have a little more contact with parents than just saying hi as they streamed by, and also wanted to maximize the number of families we interacted with. We decided that we would set up an interactive table that would:
- provide information about our counseling program
- encourage parents to sign up to receive our school counseling news by email
- give us a chance to meet or re-connect with parents
- draw in kids as well as parents
Or, to put it a different way, to draw in kids so the parents would almost have to come talk to us and find out about our program. “Hey, nothing wrong with using our specialized knowledge of kid behavior to meet some of our own needs!” said the wily school counselor.
We set up a long cafeteria table in the lobby with an easel on each side. One easel held a poster highlighting the variety of topics that we help kids with. Inspired by the Be Yourself bulletin board idea created by Susan at Entirely Elementary School Counseling, my co-counselor, Amy, made the poster by typing the topics in different fonts, which she printed on colored paper and glued onto poster board. You’ll find a link to a PDF of counseling topics on Amy’s blog, Counseling With Confidence. The other easel provided directions for the activity we had set up for the kids. Along the back of the table we displayed children’s books that are representative of the various topics we cover. On the table were clipboards with sign-up sheets (and pens) for parents who want to receive our school counseling news digitally, copies of our school counseling program flyer, and materials for the kids’ activity (see below.)
Our school counseling program flyer
Sadly, we have no picture of our table. Between the mad scramble to get it set up and the extremely large numbers of early birds we always have at our events, there was never a clear view of the completed table and we were far too busy to do anything like take a picture during the event itself. And I doubt anyone else could have taken a picture either – the area in front of the table was constantly several people deep! Suffice it to say, that it looked nice, and it served our purposes very well.
When we were cleaning up afterwards and talking about how well it had gone, Amy confessed, “I hate tabling! Whenever I had to do it in college I felt really uncomfortable.” Ack! What?!!! I had unwittingly subjected my new colleague (and mentee) to something that made her feel uncomfortable????? Had I failed to notice her feeling face???? My feeling face was shocked and horrified. I about fell all over myself apologizing and telling her she should have told me. She reassured me that it had been much better than she had expected, because the activity had drawn people to the table without us having to coerce them or feel rejected, and because we were in front of the table with the people instead of behind it. Amy’s feeling face was happy, thank goodness, and mine changed to relieved. We’ll be running an activity and information table again next year!
Feeling Faces Activity
Create feeling faces by drawing on face-shaped paper. Add hair by drawing it or by gluing or stapling shredded paper. Write the feeling somewhere on your face. by gluing or stapling. If you need some ideas, look at the list of feelings or the feelings poster.
Materials
- face-shaped paper in a variety of skin tones
- crayons, markers, and colored pencils
- scissors
- glue sticks and stapler
- shredded paper “hair”
- list of feeling words
- feeling faces poster
- examples of completed feeling faces
The kids loved this activity, and it gave us a great opportunity to talk with parents about our program and answer their questions. Although the lobby floor around our table looked a bit like Times Square on New Year’s Day after everyone had left, I highly recommend it as an Open House activity. Just make sure that you don’t unwittingly terrify your colleagues! The face-shaped paper lends itself to many counseling individual, group, and classroom, and school-wide activities, and they’re affordable – currently $4.29 for a pad of 50. Check out What’s Behind the Angry Mask to see another idea for using face-shaped paper.
What do you do for Open House? How do you reach out to parents? I hope you’ll share!
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