Ok, so I have to admit making a really old reference to a less-than-great song from the early 90s with that title, but hey, it sounded good. 🙂
What is OBPP, you probably wondering? OBPP stands for the Olweus (ohl-vay-us) Bully Prevention Program that we have recently started at our school. It’s not new–just new to us–and is actually been around for years and based on some great research.
We began our Olweus journey with a very important definition. Regardless of what we (or our students) thought bullying was, this is now our school-wide, shared definition:
We started talking about this definition last fall, after we discussed what we thought it meant. What we found out was that we were not all on the same page. How important that we’re all now speaking the same language!
The second part of starting Olweus with our kiddos came by way of learning some new bullying rules. They are related to the Robinson Road Rules that we already have in place, but are specific to what every kiddo (and adult!) should do if we see bullying happening:
After we’d been working with these two important documents for a little while, and after the staff/teachers had done some learning together about OBPP, we were ready to officially kick this off with our kiddos. This happened on a really spectacular half-day in January.
Check it out!
We started the day off together as a whole school in an assembly. The energy in the gym was so great–wish we could do this every Friday!
5th Grade sang “Everyday Heroes”
Following our assembly, 3-5 grades rotated through some activities designed to get us motivated and excited about the work ahead.
First, we had a class meeting around our new bullying rules, and our thoughts about them.
During our 2nd rotation, we got to go to the gym to work with Mr. Lee on some tae kwon do. He’s been to our school before, and always has a great presentation for us.
Here we’re learning about how bullies are more likely to target people who seem like they don’t have confidence….
Among some other things, we also did some exercises. In this video, Landry did an AMAZING job of leading us. He is BEAST!
For our last rotation, we participated in something that teachers around Robinson do all the time–look at data. As part of the Olweus work from last year, every kiddo in grades 3-5 took a bullying survey and we were looking at the results. There were graphs up all around the cafe, and our job was to silently comment on what we thought about what we saw. (As a point of clarification–our answers are represented by the 4th grade data.)
What an amazing day of inspiration and learning! We are ready and motivated to make a difference in our school and our world!
20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher 