Anti-Bullying Week 2017

Anti Bullying Week 2017  "All Different, All Equal"
Anti-Bullying Week was coordinated by the Anti-Bullying Alliance and took place from 13th - 17th November 2017. 
The theme in 2017 was 'All Different, All Equal' and it had the following aims:

  • empower children and young people to celebrate what makes them, and others, unique

  • help children and young people understand how important it is that every child feels valued and included in school, able to be themselves, without fear of bullying
  • encourage parents and carers to work with their school and talk to their children about bullying, difference and equality
  • enable teachers and other children’s workforce professionals to celebrate what makes us ‘all different, all equal’ and celebrate difference and equality. Encouraging them to take individual and collective action to prevent bullying, creating safe environments where children can be themselves.
Each afternoon, the classes took part in activities that encouraged them to think about how special and unique they were. 
Find out what each class got up to below:
 
Reception
 
Reception class spent time looking at words and how sometimes, 'words hurt' more that someone hurting you on your body. We used Jigsaw Jenie to help us understand this. Miss Padfield read out some phrases, some were kind and some were mean. Then we had to sort them into the gold sparkly box for kind words or in the bin if they were unkind words! 
 
To show this to us further, Miss Padfield squirted lots of shaving foam onto a plate. We had to pretend that we were the bottle of shaving foams and that the foam coming up was 'unkind words'. We couldn't get the shaving foam back into the bottle, which is the same as not being able to take those bad words away if we say them. 
 
We finished by saying the kindest things we could to our friends and passing a smile around the circle. 
 
 
Class 1
 During this week, Class 1 looked at what bullying means and the 3 indicators:
1. It's on purpose.
2. It happens over and over again.
3. It is unfair. 
We had 2 apples and pretended to say horrible words to 1 apple and kind words to the other apple. Although both apples looked the same on the outside, when Mrs Ashby cut open the apple that had horrible words said to it, the inside was bruised and damaged. This was used to show everyone what happens if you repeatedly call children names and put them down. We also did a similar activity with a piece of paper. We screwed it up, sat on it and jumped on it and when asked to turn it back to a nice, flat piece of paper, we couldnt! This was used to help show the children what unkind words do to a person.
 
Class 2
In Year 2 we thought about what bullying is and why it happens. We made a 'friendship tree' by filling the trunk with words to describe how a bullied child might feel. Then we wrote our ideas for helping someone who is being bullied onto paper leaves and attached them to the branches.
 
Later in the week we watched a trailer for the film 'Wonder' which tells the story of a boy who is bullied for looking different. We all agreed that looks shouldn't matter and that it's what sort of person we are that's important! We then designed and made 'kindness tokens' and used them to thank people who showed kindness to us during the week. 
 
Class 3 
Year 3 revised what bullying is and explored the various feelings that come with bullying. We used a tooth paste analogy to demonstrate that the harmful effects of bullying don't just go away; once the unkind acts have been said or done they can't go back in the tube or be forgotten. We learnt what a witness to bullying is and how watching and doing nothing can encourage and make a bullying situation worse. We used drama to act out how to react if we were a witness to bullying, made a helping hands display and blue wrist bands in keeping with year's anti-bullying national theme.
Class 4
During Anti-Bullying Week, Class 4 focused on how our differences make us unique and special . Each child created a puzzle piece that represented the unique qualities that they brought to the classroom community. We also revisited the types of bullying and had a lively debate about which one the children thought was the worst! We also completed a session on being a bystander in incidents of bullying and what you should do if you think a friend is being a bully or is being bullied. Class 4 created some information leaflets for younger children in the school, sharing information on what bullying is, what to do if you feel bullied and how to be an inclusive school.