At Admiral, we have really been working towards reducing bullying, by fostering inclusiveness, self-esteem and respect. We are eagerly preparing for our special guest speaker, Christopher Mark D'souza (whose visit has been postpone until Friday). We sang the song "I Want You To Be Nice To Me", and talked about what makes us unique. Each student, anonymously, wrote on a sticky note what they think makes them special and unique.
I read out each sticky note, and we talked about how our uniqueness makes us, "us". We talked about how important it is to accept each other's differences because they are what make us special. We talked about how essentiel it is to practice respect and inclusiveness. We listened, and sang, to the song, "Don't Laugh At Me", by Mark Wills. Even though we have all heard this song before, we were very moved by the lyrics and images.
The song lead us into a discussion on bullying, and our read aloud "Wonder", about a boy with incredible disfigurement and health issues. All his life, August has had people stop and stare at him, run away scared, call him names...
I decided that this would be an appropriate time to introduce an activity that I read about on Runde's Room, just this morning. We crumpled a paper up, calling it names and telling it how we hated it, making it small and crushed. Then I told the students to smooth it out, and apologize to the paper, over and over again. We noticed that no matter how much we apologized and tried to smooth it out, the paper would not returned to it's original state. The scars of our actions were visible all over the paper, never again to be the same.
We related this activity to our book, and to our own life. We talked about how our words and actions have consequences, and that we have to be mindful of how we treat each other, because "Sorry" cannot undo a wrong. We shared stories of people who had been change for life by comments that others have said to them.
Then we answered the following three questions on our piece of "scarred" paper:
- What did we do?
- What did you learn?
- How can you connect this activity to Auggie in Wonder?
YOU CAN SEE HOW POWERFUL THIS ACTIVITY WAS BUT THE RESPONSES THE STUDENTS WROTE.
After we completed this activity, Mikayla shared with us that sometimes it is when we PUT OURSELVES DOWN that we cause the most damage. We can sometimes be our own worse enemy. She shared a personal story of when she was once very frustrated with math."One time I thought I was really bad at math so I looked at myself in the mirror and started saying 'you are never going to get math, you are horrible at it and will never ever have a smart brain.'''
She believed what she had told herself. She realized that her own words had hurt her. She did not want to do math. She talked to her mom about her feelings and her mom helped her realize that you should "never ever put yourself down and always think that you are awesome".
We talked about the importance of positive self-talk and how important it is to stop putting ourselves down. This reminded me of an activity that I read about either on Runde's Room or Teachingroom6, or somewhere.
I asked students to think about the things they tell themselves they can't do or that they are really bad at. I gave each student a slip of paper to write this self-talk down on. Then we lined up at the paper shredder, each, in turn, sharing (for those who wanted to) what we "Can't Do". Then we shredded our negative thoughts, saying them out loud, but adding the word "YET" at the end of our sentence.
For example, "I can't do algebra (shred), YET!" This showed us that we need to change our mind set. It is not that we can't do it, but that we can't do it, yet! We are going to do it! Students were excited to shred their negative thoughts.
Unfortunately, the bus bell rang, so we were unable to discuss how this activity made us feel, or helped us change our mindset, but I feel that it had an impact on students.
