It’s anti-bullying week this week and the children have spent the day refreshing our minds on everything around bullying and how to prevent it. To begin, Year 5 discussed the definition of bullying in our school and the different roles that might come an incidence of bullying. At St James, we use STOP as an acronym to remember our anti-bullying policy. This stands for:
Several Times on Purpose
If children were to experience bullying, they should:
Start Telling Other People
From here, we discussed that it’s not only a victim of bullying that should follow this code – it’s anyone and everyone involved. Whether you are a victim, defender or simply a bystander, it’s everyone’s job to help prevent bullying.
The children then looked at some scenarios of made up school situations and had to discuss whether these were bullying behaviours or not. Once decided, the children then offered advice to all parties involved in the scenario. Year 5 did extremely well with this and all pupils were ready to input helpful ideas.
Year 5 have also started our daily friendship and support sessions today – these will happen each day before every break and lunch time to help maintain positive relationships. Today’s learning was: What makes a good friend? The task for the children was to use a positive friendship quality outside and many of them wrote down their examples in our friendship book.
Help at home: Today, we discussed why we don’t use the term ‘bully’ but we might use the term ‘bullying’. Discuss why this might be with your child and see if they can explain.
Answer: The term bully is used to define someone and it becomes part of their identity – we don’t want to be labelling anyone with a negative characteristic. Instead we might use the term bullying to describe words and/or actions instead.