3 Classroom Activities That Can Prevent Bullying
Students spend most of their school day in their classrooms. Therefore, it is important to work to prevent bullying in this context. We have compiled the following article where we go through three group activities that work to prevent bullying.
3 classroom activities that can prevent bullying
Schools play an active role in both stopping ongoing bullying and preventing it. Below we offer a detailed description of three group activities that can prevent bullying at school.
Come together to rules for coexistence
- Encourages cohesion in the group.
- Encourages a good climate for academic coexistence.
- Makes students reflect on their behavior in school.
- Establishes a commitment, both individually and as a group, to follow the rules.
To prevent bullying with this activity, the teacher must lead his class through the following steps:
- Ask the children to brainstorm and come up with rules that they all have to apply in the classroom for the rest of the year. Have them share their ideas aloud with the rest of the class.
- Write down their suggestions on the board.
- Send out a blank piece of paper to each student. Then ask them to write down the rules of coexistence that they think are best for voting on the most important rules.
- Count the number of votes and choose the 10 most popular rules for coexistence.
- Write down these rules on a large poster and hang it somewhere in the classroom where students can see it.
An exercise to learn to see similarities and differences
Sometimes small groups of friends are formed in the school and the classroom. When this happens, a strong bond develops between them, but they do not get the opportunity to get to know their other classmates very well.
The purpose of this activity is for all classmates to get to know each other and thereby maximize cohesion and group identity. The goals of the activity are as follows:
- Getting to know all your classmates better.
- Encourage teamwork and group cohesion.
- To become aware of the importance of one’s own feelings and thoughts, as well as those of others.
- To increase awareness of diversity in the classroom.
To carry out the activity, the teacher should lead the class through the following tasks:
- Distribute a piece of paper to each student and have them answer a set of questions about their personal interests and preferences.
- Divide the class into small groups so that they can find answers they have in common without judging any of their classmates.
- Give each group a large piece of paper. Have them write down the interests and preferences they have in common in a column. Have them write down their differences in the second column.
- Read the answers on the resulting papers without saying which group they belong to. In this way, students must try to guess which answers belong to which group.
Presentation and in-depth study of the concept of bullying
Today, it is common for students to hear the word “bullying” from the media, from adults and from their classmates. And even though they know that bullying exists in a broader sense, they do not necessarily have a clear idea of what it really is.
This activity helps students really understand what bullying is. After all, to prevent bullying, we must first define it. So the goals of this group activity are as follows:
- Provide information about the concept of bullying to students.
- Encourage students to identify situations where bullying occurs in school.
- Strengthen the willingness to cooperate.
To carry out this activity, the teacher must give the following instructions:
- Ask students to divide into small groups and come up with their own definition of bullying.
- Present their definitions aloud and write them down on the board.
- Create a common definition based on the ideas of the whole class.
- If the students have missed to mention some relevant details about the concept, the teacher must contribute with them.
- Write down the agreed definition of bullying on a poster and hang it together with the class rules for coexistence.
- Send out cards to the students that describe different situations. Have students say whether the situations on their cards belong to the category of bullying or not. This allows the teacher to verify if the students have understood the concept and can recognize bullying situations.