On Monday afternoon, it was brought to my attention that I have some bullying going on between some of the students in my class. Most of my students (11 out of 14 to be exact), have been together for at least a year in a half now. This has produced relationships that mimic sibling bonds - and the good and bad that come with that. I was aware of the pushing buttons and minor disagreements they had, but full scale bullying was surprising and upsetting. Although it hurt my heart to hear it was going on, I knew it was a valuable learning opportunity for our class as a whole and something that needed to be addressed...stat.
So, I moseyed on over to Pinterest and spent an hour, or four, researching lessons, books and activities on bullying.
Here's a peek into how we are tackling bulling in our class, days 1 and 2:
Day 1: During our library time on Tuesday morning, one of my aides found this book and we immediately snatched it up and read it as soon as we got back to class, right before recess. I used this time to introduce the term "bully" and survey what my students already knew and their reactions. Then, I read the book with a LOT of emotion and animation and my students were captivated. Well most of them, except for the one student who really needed to listen. Isn't that how it always goes? Guilty conscience? They seemed to really listen and started to get it. Mini lightbulbs may have even shown up above their heads and I counted it as one point in my favor! ("The show where everything is made up and the points don't matter" - but they totally have more points than me! Please tell me someone gets that reference...)
Day 2: Even though they really listened during our book yesterday, I knew we had to do some hands-on activities to really drive home the learning. Good old Pinterest came through again and I found this amazing lesson. To summarize: I got 2 apples that look very similar and started a generic lesson on comparing and contrasting. Then, seemingly suddenly, I choose one apple and started pointing out everything that was wrong with it. "This apply has a hole!" "How GROSS!" "This is the most disgusting apple I have EVER seen!" And I threw it on the ground. Wait, WHAT?!
Yep, and then I had all my students do the same thing. They took turns berating the apple and dropping it on the ground. When it got back to me, we looked at the apple again to see if anything had changed, and surprisingly, it hadn't. But when we cut into the apples to eat them, one apple was crisp and white. The other apple, was bruised and brown and squishy. When I asked the students who wanted to eat the bruised apple, they all said no (well except for one who likes the attention of being different, there's always one isn't there?). But why? WE did this to the apple! We made it like, so we should eat it!
Ooooh, aaaah. See what I did there? We bullied the apple! And they didn't even know until it was over! Even though we each only said one mean thing or threw it once, it was REALLY bruised and icky. All those mean comments and actions added up, and even though the apple looked okay on the outside, it definitely was not okay on the inside. I was a little worried my students wouldn't make such an abstract connection, but I started to see lightbulbs go off left and right. Most of my students felt legitimately bad about what we had done to the poor apple and we had a great follow-up discussion about the activity (which is saying something, especially for my kiddos with language delays!)
I didn't get any pictures of the activity because we were so wrapped up in it, but trust me, it was great! I did get a picture of my sloppy Venn Diagram though, so there ya go :)
Tune back in this weekend for the last 2 lessons we will be doing to help banish bullying in our classroom and make sure we are being BUDDIES, not bullies!
Thanks for stopping by!
Alyssa
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