February 27th is National Pink Shirt Day. Today, our school was a sea of pink as we did our part to stand up against bullying.
National Pink Shirt Day was started in 2008 as a response to two boys in Nova Scotia who took a stand against bullying by supporting a boy who was bullied for wearing a pink shirt to school. These two boys saw the incident and went out and purchased 50 pink shirts to distribute to other boys at the school to wear. You can read more about pink shirt day here at www.pinkshirtday.ca.
We kept the theme going in our classroom today. I had slips of paper in my "name jar" with the words the bully, the bullied, and the bystander. Each student had to choose a slip of paper to examine the issue of bullying from one of those three points of view. The students then got into three groups to "talk it out". They discussed what their feelings would be, reasons for the behaviour, actions, etc. By taking the "role" of either the bully, the bullied, or the bystander, students felt more free to discuss the feelings as they felt they weren't being too personal, or sharing too much.
They then had to write a poem from the point of view they had chosen. We used a simple "I Am" template for the poem. The end results were SO powerful! Students typed them out and I photocopied them onto the T-shirt template on bright pink paper. We are going to read some of our poems at our end of the month assembly tomorrow.
As students finished their poems, I gave them another T-shirt template, this time photocopied onto a light pink piece of paper. They designed their own T-shirts with an anti-bullying message. LOVE them! We cut the T-shirts out and made a wonderful bulletin board display with a powerful anti-bullying message to share with the school.
I have uploaded a copy of the template we used for the poems and the T-shirt to google docs. You can click HERE or on the picture to the right to grab a copy for yourself. I have read that April 10th, 2013 is International Pink Shirt Day - does your school celebrate pink shirt day?
Happy Wednesday!!! We're half-way there!