Celebrating Differences

Am I normal?

To begin this topic we finished the sentence “Being normal is ...” independently, we then played a game where Mrs Crowther read different statements and we had to stand or sit if it was normal or not, this opened up a really interesting discussion. We then decided if we wanted to change our statement from the beginning.

We talked about how identity and diversity were important terms to know. Have a look at the work we did by following the link below.

Understanding difference

We spent some time discussing some similarities and differences of groups of people in pictures and talked about how our society is so diverse but unfortunately that some people were treated unfairly and linked this to the equality act and protected characteristics.

We read a story about Robert Cowell who and how she became Roberta Cowell. We read about her life and talked about how difficult it may of been for her at that time as transgender and how that affected her life.

In groups we wrote the word rights on a piece of paper that we felt were important in a welcoming community. We then swapped our paper with a different group and they added the responsibility. We related this back and thought a which from our list would have supported Roberta.

Power struggles

To start this lesson Mrs Crowther started saying some of us were cool and that others weren’t, it took us a while to realise she was picking different criteria like some of us had our legs crossed, some of us were wearing glasses. We quickly agreed that this wasn’t fair and that Mrs Crowther was showing bias and treating some of us differently.

She gave us different scenarios and we had to discuss who in the scenario had the power and how they had it. Ultimately we agreed that bully’s and other people can only gain power and use that power over others if we let them.

Why bully?

Mrs Crowther gave us different scenarios and we had to move around the classroom to the 'Bullying', 'Not Bullying' and 'Not Sure'. This prompted us to have a discussion about what bullying actually is and create a clear definition. We created a list of why some people bully and different strategies we could use to help ourselves and others in different scenarios.

Celebrating Differences

We shared pictures and watched some video clips of paralympians. It was fascinating to watch and we were all very inspired. In pairs or individually we researched a paralympian and created an 'Admiration Accolade'.