More Great Ideas for Celebrating No Name-Calling Week!

Mar 22, 2006

1. Create a Pledge Banner for students to sign against name-calling/bullying.
2. Have students take a survey about bullying in their school.
3. Make a list of things you can do when you see or hear bullying in school.
4. Hold a raffle with assorted prizes that students can enter each time they choose to participate in an anti-bullying activity or workshop.
5. Have students enter their ideas for a No Name-Calling Week Slogan into a contest. The winner’s slogan is used as the school’s theme for NNCW, and students create essays and posters that promote this slogan.
6. Hold an essay contest for grades 3-8, and have the winning essay displayed in the office, read over the loudspeaker during morning announcements, and reproduced in the school’s weekly newspaper.
7. Create a skit that addresses name-calling and bullying. Perform it live or videotape it and show it during NNCW as a school-wide video announcement.
8. Get lots of clubs involved – ask a representative from each club to put together an announcement/message on how bullying and name-calling applies to their group (for example, Black Student Union on the history and use of the “N-Word”).
9. Ask students and staff to fill out a survey about prejudice and display the results around the school.
10. Read the poem “Truth” by Barrie Wade aloud.
11. Have students create and wear bracelets made of yarn and beads to show that they have pledged not to bully.
12. Create banners with the school’s anti-bullying pledge that are then signed by everyone and displayed in a central location.
13. Have students create a script for a skit about an incident of name-calling, and how two students find another way to solve their problem without using names (for instance, by using an “I” statement instead). Perform the skit at a school assembly.
14. Discuss Dr. King (tie-in to MLK Day) and what he stood for and did.
15. Ask students to write a letter to the other students in their school expressing how they feel about bullying and name-calling and its consequences. Then have them find 5 students to read the letter, and let them survey the readers’ opinions on the topic. They can also ask those 5 students to sign an anti-bullying pledge based on what they read in the letter.
16. Help students to write a play about homophobia using their own personal stories over a 6-month process of writing exercises, theater games, etc. The play is performed and a slam book is made available to audience members to comment on the show.