Great Interventions for Disarming Bully Behavior
By some estimates, 75 percent of children will be bullied at some point in their school career. Incidents of bullying appear first in pre-school, gradually increase throughout the elementary grades, peak in middle school and decline in high school.
In the elementary grades, bullying may be confined to teasing, name-calling and other put-downs. As they grow older, confirmed bullies are apt to resort to increasingly physical and violent behavior. The warning signs for bullying are well known. If you know what to look for, you can identify most bullies early in their careers, and early in the school year at every grade level.
The fifteen lessons in this book form a cohesive program and strategy for dealing effectively with bullying. They are arranged sequentially and should be implemented in the order they appear. The first few activities are devoted to helping children develop a greater awareness of the ingredients and dynamics of bullying—the feelings and reactions it generates in victims and bystanders and the possible motivations of bullies.
Next, students are given an opportunity to examine their individual rights, to understand how bullying violates those rights, and to recognize the importance of protecting and preserving them.
One of the principle aims of this comprehensive bully-prevention program is to strengthen the resistance of all students to bully behaviors. This is accomplished through a systematic effort to promote healthy social-emotional development in every child. Here are the sequential lessons in this book: