October is a month full of special days and important topics to focus on. First, did you know that October is National Bullying Prevention Month? I am excited that the specialists will be starting to spend several weeks focusing on a specific core value. And the core value we will be talking about over the next few weeks is...ACCEPTANCE. This is such an important topic to discuss with kids, and it's an important skill to help with bullying prevention. Did you also know that October 10th is World Inclusion Day? Check out this website for more information about the non-profit that started this special day along with ways to show inclusion. I recently learned of another special day in October. October 20th is National Youth Confidence Day. From their website: "It’s a day to celebrate the potential of young people, their accomplishments, energy, and spirit. The aim is to instill confidence into them and continue to help them grow into successful adults." Our awesome PTO is planning to write some confidence boosting messages in chalk for students to see when they arrive in the morning on the 20th. I have begun to to post some positive messages in the bathrooms and will continue to add more throughout the month. I have celebrated another special day during this month in other schools and would love for us to celebrate it at Clough. It's called Positive Post It Day. I will drop a video down below that tells about the student who created this event. Maybe we plan to do it on Oct 20th, the same day as National Youth Confidence Day? Students and staff are encouraged to write positive messages on post it notes and display them around the school. You can give them to specific people or you can simply write them to anyone and post them anywhere in the school. All of these days seem to fit perfectly with our focus on ACCEPTANCE during KCR time over the next few weeks. While it is good that we have these blocks of time to teach kids about acceptance, only talking about it during KCR time will not send the message that this is something that is important for us as a whole school. The specialists will share with you information about the activities and discussions that happen. I have lots of great book recommendations for read alouds related to acceptance. I will also be sharing messages about acceptance during morning announcements. And I will share information with parents as well so they can continue the discussions at home. Sadly, we have already had several incidents during this school year where students have used hurtful words towards peers, have called out others for being different from them. Everyone needs to be talking more about what acceptance means to them, what we can do to model acceptance in our school, and why acceptance is such an important and difficult conversation topic in today's world. While it's great that we have all these special days and a whole month about bullying prevention...we really should not need calendar days or months to remind us about being accepting and being inclusive. Someday I hope we won't need to celebrate specials days to remind us all to accept people who are different from us. I hope we won't need national days for everyone to feel welcomed and that they belong. We won't need them because it will be just what we do, every day of every month, all year long. I am in the middle of listening to Where the Crawdads Sing and find myself anxiously waiting until my next car ride so I can listen to more of it! I also started a new book this weekend that I can't seem to put down. It's called Attack of the Black Rectangles. The story is about a class of 6th graders who are discovering that their town has a lot of rules and even parts of the books they are reading are beginning to be censored. The students are not ok with this...can't wait to read more about how they protest this censorship. With Indigenous Day just happening and Thanksgiving coming up, I read a new picture book that is a celebration of the land and a tribute to the Tlingit tribe.
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