Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Superheroes and Sidekicks. . .against bullying

Our school recently celebrated a "theme week," with this year's theme being "Superheroes and Sidekicks." This was a theme that was centred around our Greatest Superhero, Jesus Christ, whose greatest gift to us was His saving love. We focused on the following verses:

Matthew 22:36-40

New International Version (NIV)
36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

In this theme, we tried to foster positive character building and friendship traits by taking a villain--something that stops love from being spread--and to fight that with a superpower, which turned out to be the fruit of the spirit. The theme week overlapped "Pink Shirt Day," a day in which people wear a pink shirt to show their desire to take a stand against bullying.
The school's PAC so willingly decorated the display case in a "comic book"style. Our week included Captain Bucket-filler--a superhero we created in connection to the book about filling people's buckets--and our school's theme from last year about how God desires us to fill the buckets of others by doing kind and loving things.
One of the grade five classes created these banners for the "Pink Shirt Day."

Our staff room had a HUGE table filled with resources about friendship and bullying for teachers to use throughout the week.

Here is Captain Bucket-filler himself (our principal!) in a visit to each classroom to encourage the students to keep filling others buckets!

Pink Shirt Day was accompanied by pink lemonade for all the kids and treats to celebrate friendship!

Friday was a superhero dress-up day, closing chapel, and grade-level presentations.

Each class was responsible for creating a project of some kind to present to their grade level on Friday to show what they learned about friendship. My group of grade ones picked the villain, "The Meany Monster. We created "Wanted" posters with pictures of crazy monsters and wrote descriptions about what a mean monster might do. Then we talked a bunch about the Fruit of the Spirit.
With a little searching on google, I found colours that represented the fruit of the Spirit, so we made beaded bracelets for our grade one friends in the other classes, and also made a card that went along with it explaining how we wanted to practice "loving our neighbors" by letting the fruit of the spirit flow out of us instead of those mean traits.

Here are some of the kids working so hard on their cards. (We each had to make 2-3 bracelets/cards so that we could have one for ourselves and also share them with the other classes!)
It was a great week of watching the presentations of the other classes and spending a lot of time talking about how we can show love to God and our neighbor in the way we treat our friends.
The week started out with an opening chapel, featuring a teacher skit of a Sloth who saved his sleepy friends, even though they at first found him annoying.
The week ended with a worship chapel, where we also acted out the Good Samaritan story and sang our favourite song of the week, "Jesus, You're My Superhero!"

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