Wednesday, January 26, 2011

No Name Calling Week

 Did you know that this week is No Name Calling week. I know for some of you this may be hard. People like to call me names - like perfect, beautiful, fun, silly, loyal...you know all those wonderful things.


Seriously though, this is No Name Calling week. I think it's a great idea. Tell your kids and maybe they will go a week without calling someone a name. Maybe it will catch on and they will stop doing it. 


What is it:
No Name-Calling Week is an annual week of educational activities aimed at ending name-calling of all kinds and providing schools with the tools and inspiration to launch an on-going dialogue about ways to eliminate bullying in their communities.

Who should participate:
Anyone who wants to work towards eliminating harmful name-calling, harassment and bullying in their school can be a part of No Name-Calling Week, whether you are a teacher, student, guidance counselor, coach, librarian or bus driver. 

No Name-Calling Week was inspired by a young adult novel entitled "The Misfits" by popular author, James Howe. The book tells the story of four best friends trying to survive the seventh grade in the face of all too frequent taunts based on their weight, height, intelligence, and sexual orientation/gender expression. Motivated by the inequities they see around them, the "Gang of Five" (as they are known) creates a new political party during student council elections and run on a platform aimed at wiping out name-calling of all kinds. Though they lose the election, they win the support of the school's principal for their cause and their idea for a "No Name-Calling Day" at school. 

Motivated by this simple, yet powerful, idea, the No Name-Calling Week Coalition, created by GLSEN and Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, and consisting of over 40 national partner organizations, organized an actual No Name-Calling Week in schools across the nation during the week of March 1-5, 2004. This year, No Name-Calling Week will take place the week of January 24-28, 2011. The project seeks to focus national attention on the problem of name-calling in schools, and to provide students and educators with the tools and inspiration to launch an on-going dialogue about ways to eliminate name-calling in their communities.

7 comments:

  1. What an excellent idea! Hope it catches on for more than just one week a year :)

    Thanks for following Magical Mouse Schoolhouse! I am following back.

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  2. That is a great idea! But that means I can't call Brian any names like goober.

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  3. This is a brilliant idea but when I told my husband he couldn't shot rude names at the motorists today he called me a 'buffoon' :(
    Thank you for dropping by today and I hope you collected your well deserved 'Awesome Blog Award'. Yes, the whole splitting my leggings thing went down in history at that school...by the next day everyone had heard and when I went to take the next class it was not only full of girls but every boy over the age of fourteen in the school all hoping the same thing would happen again. Life!

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  4. shout not shot although he'd probably like to shoot some of the bad motorists if he could!

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  5. Well crap. Probably should have read about this before today's post. Oh well. I'll practice it the rest of the week. ;O)

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  6. CRAP.
    I'll try this. Next week.

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  7. I wish I had read this earlier. I just called another blogger a dork. Oops. I will try harder.

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