The following letter just went out to our K-8 families from Kate Klaire, Social/Emotional Learning Coordinator.
Dear K-8 Families,
As you may have already read in this week’s Newsnotes, TBS is participating in No Name Calling Week, January 21st-25th. This is a national effort sponsored by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to end name calling, teasing, and bullying of all kinds. Though we work with students throughout the year to cultivate kindness and generous hearts towards others, we will spend the next few weeks explicitly addressing what teasing and bullying look and feel like in our community, and ways to help one another in our K-8 classrooms.
Our instructional focus during this time will be how to be respectful of others, understanding the difference between bullying and gateway behaviors, and why it’s important not to be a bystander to aggression. We will be using curriculum from Responsive Classroom, Teaching Tolerance, and other bullying-prevention resources, as well as lessons that we develop ourselves. We will also be showing select video clips from the anti-bullying educational film Let’s Get Real as well as from the It Gets Better Project, when and where it is age-appropriate to do so.
Be sure to look for posts about this work on your classroom’s blog. Classrooms will be doing varied activities and these posts will show you what we are doing at each grade level. We’ll be sharing age-targeted resources through the blogs as well; here are some resources to get you started, including links on how to talk with your child about bullying or bully prevention.
No Name-Calling Week from GLSEN
Let’s Get Real at Groundspark.org
“Bullyproof your Classroom” from Responsive Classroom
Teaching Tolerance from the Southern Poverty Law Center
We invite you to join us in this work at home. We encourage you to share with your child about the acts of kindness and respect that you notice; let them know when you witness something that shows she/he is growing up to be genuinely caring of others. Practice together as a family what it means to be thoughtful with each other, and what it means to notice kind acts and offer appreciations. Celebrate the goodness in our community.
We are so fortunate that our students are not faced with the types of blatant and overt bullying that occurs in some schools, and we also know that we need to help them understand how to navigate experiences of unkindness and conflict with peers. One Middle School student has come up with a phrase for us as we think about this at TBS: “Words Can Hurt, People Can Help.” It’s our hope that through this work, all students feel empowered to help themselves and all members of our community. If you have any questions or resources, please contact me.
Be well,
Kate Klaire
Social/Emotional Learning Coordinator
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