What+did+you+call+me?

The announcements come on Monday January 25th, 2016. Most of the students are in their homerooms settling in. An announcement comes over the speaker saying that we are running a Wednesday schedule! How exciting! NOT. Most of us really don't like Wednesday schedules because of all of the confusions and later lunch times for some people or earlier.

After that was announced we all look at each other and said “What! Why?” Apparently this week is no name calling week. Every day in homeroom there is going to be a new activity that involves no name calling and bullying.

The first activity was watching a video of these other kids that did the same activity and gave us examples of what we have to do. Señora Currier, our homeroom teacher handed out a piece of paper that on one side said “Please don't call me” and then on the other side said “Because I am” and you would fill in what you don't want to be called and a substitution to be called. An example of one of them was “Please don't call me ugly, because I am Pretty.”

At the end of the day the whole school met up in the auditorium for an all school assembly in the auditorium. While the teams were walking in and finding their seats a video with different students doing fun activities or doing academic work with others was playing up on the screen above the stage. It was cool to see what other students are doing in different classes and teams, and I thought it was a great way to show the student not calling people names and being kind to others and having fun without name calling.

As the everyone filled the auditorium some of the student stood on the stage with posters that said important things about name calling on them. Our school also had contacted 2 girls from BHS to come and talk to all of us briefly about something that happened to them when she swore at students and felt bad about it and wanted to fix what she had done to some of her classmates.

At the very end of the speeches about no name calling week, band, chorus, and orchestra performed for the whole school. The first group to perform was the 6th grade orchestra, followed by the 7th and 8th grade orchestra. The 6th grade orchestra played We Will Rock You, and the 7th and 8th grade played Haida Haida. Next the 6th grade band performed followed by the 7th and 8th grade band. The 6th grade played some scales and familiar tunes out of their books. The 7th and 8th grade played the song clocks. Last but not least the chorus sang for us. Mr.Korman teaches 6th grade and 7th and 8th grade chorus separately but in this case they all sang together. They sang Goodnight Irene and another beautiful song in a different language that I'm not sure what it was called.

All of the different groups did a great job performing to the whole school. You can tell that everyone in each music department has worked really had from the beginning of the year until now to show how well they are doing.

On Tuesday we really didn't do anything in homeroom. Wednesday in homeroom we watch a couple of videos that were showing that love has no labels. The videos that were shown were great I actually really enjoyed them. At lunch that same day a group of people handed out orange ribbons for no name calling week.

On Wednesday a student on team Oasis Rejos Neopany created a video of him an our assistant principal Mr. Amto where Rejos interviewed him about bullying and what bullying is, how to prevent it, and information you might need to know about bullying. This was also a very well put together video by a 7th grade student.

On Thursday we wrote on a different colored piece of paper what we would do if we saw bullying. For example you could put “Tell an adult.” something as simple as that. After everyone in that homeroom wrote something down the teacher collected them and made a chain out of all of the papers. Once that mini chain from each homeroom was collected someone made a huge chain of all of the mini chains put together and hung it up out on the walls in the hallway.

On Friday some of the students made rainbow hearts and a couple of students went around the lunchroom asking students want and Ally is. If you answered somewhat or close to what an Ally is then you would get a rainbow heart.

I thought that this was a great week for everyone in the school to be nice to each other and not call each other names. Our school does a lot of things to prevent thing which is great for our school community.

Written by Hannah