Our character lessons series matches one book with a variety of activities to help kids learn more about the focus behavior. So far we’ve shared activities about spreading rumors, being yourself, and friendship. Today we’re using a great book to help kids learn more about bullying.
Character Lessons to Go with The Recess Queen
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The Recess Queen dives into the world of playground bullies and how students can handle those bullies. Mean Jean is, well, mean, but this changes when the new girl, Katie Sue, shows up. This is a great book for talking about how we react to others and how to handle difficult situations.
Book Activities
The Affect of Our Actions
After reading The Recess Queen discuss with students the events in the book and how each character’s actions affected the Recess Queen. Debbie’s Dabbling’s has a few ideas and an activity sheet that you can use as you discuss the book.
Monkey Bar Poster
This was a great activity that really got my students thinking and talking about positive actions they can demonstrate. My teaching partner created a large set of monkey bars on paper that we used for this and it looks awesome! Unfortunately, I did not take a picture so you will have to imagine how awesome it looked.
Before beginning this activity, create a poster that has a large set of monkey bars (you can make any playground equipment). As a class, discuss positive behaviors that we see on the playground. After discussing these behaviors, students come up with one positive thing they can do on the playground. Students then write their positive recess behavior on the monkey bars poster. This is another great poster to have up that shows positive actions for students.
Character Traits
This is an easy activity that students can complete with a partner or in a small group. Have each group create a list of character traits for Mean Jean and Katie Sue. Then have students discuss in their group or with the whole class how the two characters are alike and how they are different.
Bully Lessons
The Ned Show has 2nd grade bully lessons that go with this book. The site also has other books and lessons for all grade levels.
More Books About Bullying
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