More Rules, Less Bullies

This is a Project Based Learning project for first graders. This addresses the standard 1.2.2 Define and give examples of rules and laws in the school and the community and explain the benefits of these rules and laws. The first graders will group up and act as the principal of the school to address bullying. 

Driving Question

The driving question is, if each group of students is a principal of a school, their job is to explain how the rules of that school benefit each student and then further describing how they would deal with a bully, finalizing their project by explaining how to help the student getting bullied. Unfortunately, bullying is prevalent in all school systems today, causing students to not enjoy coming to class and getting the most out of their educations. Bullying is talked about each day, how you should treat others how you want to be treated, but yet nothing is changing. By asking students this question, as a teacher, you can get suggestions on how to improve your classroom, while also teaching the students about why rules and laws are in place. This question is relevant and warrants a deeper study for students because bullying is a big issue in the lower levels of education. There are several different ways to answer this question, not just one right answer. Students will be forced to analyze several different solutions to the presented question and discover which solutions would be the most beneficial to the school they are assigned. Once they create a solution to the problem, they will then need to determine why these rules are in place. How do rules create a safer environment for both the teachers and the students? This prompt causes students to not just learn about the issues bullying surfaces, but actually try to find a way to stop it and fix it, and then defend their answer, stating why their rules will create a better environment.

Grabber

For our grabber, we will be presenting the students with a video, showing them an example of a student being bullied on the playground and in the school setting.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3rqtxSCV-E This will hook the students because it will heighten their emotions on the subject, due to their personal connections to the video. It shows elementary school students just like them in a school, just like theirs. Students will immediately be intrigued by the video because the character in the video is just like them. By watching the video of the child, a connection will be made between the children in the classroom and the children in the video. Furthermore, this will lead the students to ask more questions on how they can either help the children being bullied, or how they can prevent the bullying from happening on their playground or classroom. This grabber capitalizes on the high emotion situation because several students are faced with this situation daily, also making it relevant to their lives. This grabber will be used to initiate the students’ thought processes on the issue and get them thinking about how to resolve this issue. By enabling the students to eye witness the bullying happening, they will automatically begin to search for solutions on how they can put a stop to this situation, and how they can help prevent it from happening.

Culminating Activity

To start the project, the students will view the grabber, which is the video of students getting bullied in a school setting just like they experience. The students will then be split up into groups of four or five students depending on the class size where each group will act as a principal of a school. Each student will have their own opinion on what type of discipline is fair for the bullies and how to help the victims, and then as a group, they will determine what rules should be put into place, why those rules are important or useful, and how they can help prevent bullying. After the group discusses what they feel is right, each group will have to make a poster with the rules they come up with about bullying. The next step of the project is each group will construct a chatterpix as the principal giving a talk to the students on his or her expectations about the rules of the school. Each group will present their poster at the end of the project along with their chatterpix. This project correlates with the standard because students are learning why it is important to have rules in school and they learn the benefits of rules to help create a safer learning environment. As a teacher it is important to make sure the students gain respect for the rules of the school and their peers from this activity. The goal of this PBL project is to have the students look at different situations from different points of views. During this activity the students are able to see from the point of view of a principal, showing how a principal is a good leader and a good person in the school that is there to help, not just get students in trouble.

Rubric