Bully Free Week

After reading about Bully Free Awareness Week at Elementary School Counseling I thought this would be a great school-wide program to implement early in the school year.  My goal was to 1. tackle the problem of bullying and 2. get into every classroom so that each student could get to know who I am and what I do.  

I chose to start the first week of September thinking this would let teachers get to know their students a little bit, but not too far into the year that major problems have occurred.  I of course thought this was a great plan...until I realized there is that long-standing day off called Labor Day and I had to attend a nearly all day training on Thursday.  Did I change the week...nope I just crammed 23 classroom lessons into 3 days and kept a smile on my ragged face!

I started by having each teacher sign up for a time that I could come into the classroom.  I planned my lessons to be as short as 15 minutes or go up to 30 minutes.  I wanted to be flexible so I could fit my lesson into whatever time the teacher had to give me. During each lesson I started by explaining our definition of bullying.  I really felt this was the most important thing because let's face it, the big bad word of BULLYING is a hard concept for kids to truly understand.  I wanted it to be really easy and thought Marissa Rex's definition at Elementary School Counseling was perfect.  So each class learned to go through a checklist:

1. Is it happening over and over again?

2. Is it the same people involved each time?

3. Is it happening on purpose?

4. Is it hurting either your body or your feelings?

In each grade and every class I shared this definition and went over each question and we discussed examples.  In grades 1-3 we watched a video of Morton being bullied  and discussed what could we do if we were Morton as well as what we could do if we saw it happen to someone else. We discussed the best ways to deal with bullies and explained each classroom's bully reporting procedures.  

Lastly, we had a door decorating contest.  I am a sucker for door decorating.  It was one of my favorite things as a classroom teacher, especially when students got to be a part of it and take ownership in doing the work.  So, I challenged each class to decorate their door showing how they would stop bullying.  At the end of the week we judged the doors and the winning K-2 class and the winning 3-5 class won popsicles!  Here are their doors:

 
 

 

All in all I think it was a good starting point for the year.  Do I feel it magically stopped bullying....no, but each kid meet me and teachers now have a tool to discuss bullying with students.  

Since doing this I've developed a bullying plan for our school that I will talk about in another post.  If anyone has any other ideas on how to get the bully bug under control I would love more ideas for the future!