Most people don’t know what bullying is and what it isn’t!

There’s a lot of different types of bullying. This series covers all the different forms that bullying takes!

The first step to taking a stand against bullying is identifying it. Check out the articles below to get started!

Different Types of Bullying…

• Introduction – How to define bullying, and a general introduction to the various topics that will be covered!
• Covert Vs. Overt Bullying – There’s a world of difference between these two types of bullying. Understanding that difference can help us understand why bullying takes on so many forms!
• Physical Violence – The is the first type of bullying everyone thinks of. It’s the easiest type to identify.
• Rumors – Has anyone ever talked about you behind your back? You probably didn’t like it did you?
• Exclusion – Have you ever been made to feel like an outsider? Have you ever been the one guy not invited to a party? Then you’ve experienced exclusion first hand!
• Teasing – Teasing is a misunderstood form of bullying. Sometimes teasing is just good fun. Other times it’s extremely hurtful!
• Name Calling – What’s the power of a name? What happens when someone else assigns a mean name to you? This article explores that idea.
• Threats – With a threat the bully doesn’t have to take any action at all. The possibility of something happening is used to manipulate the target.
• Cyberbullying – Cyberbullying is just like any other kind of bullying. It just happens online instead of in person! The internet can make a bully even more powerful…

Magic is a POWERFUL teaching tool.

It gets kid’s attention, engages their minds, and makes learning FUN!

You don’t have to be a professional magician!

You can unleash the power of magic on your classroom today!

Your students will be on the edge of their seats… Excited and ready to learn!

Each short video in this series teaches an EASY magic trick with an educational application.

You’ll be EDUtaining immediately.

Webisode List:

• Cut & Restored Balloon – Show your classroom a balloon. Now take a pair of scissors and cut a big hole in the bottom of it. Then blow up the balloon to show it magically restored! This is a fun trick that teaches kids about “Put-Up’s” and “Put-Down’s”.

• Torn & Restored Napkin – Show a napkin, tear it up, and restore it by magic! This super easy trick is a great way to teach kids about the power of recycling!

• Decantation Card Trick – Teach kids the scientific principal of decantation through this simple card trick! The red and black cards magically separate. This trick requires absolutely no skill and is really cool!

If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you already know about our school assembly programs

There’s a lot of people out there who offer assemblies. Many of them are incredible. A lot of them could probably use some improvement.

When I speak with schools on the phone one thing I always ask is about previous assemblies they’ve had. I get a variety of responses.

Things We’ve Been Told About Other School Shows:

“He was so dull and boring! I felt bad for the kids. I was miserable and I know they were too!”

“He really didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He made one of the kids cry by accident!”

“They were extremely unprofessional. I wouldn’t ask them to come back.”

My point is not to knock on anyone else’s work. It’s that creating a school assembly is much harder work than coming up with an idea and throwing it out there.

Here’s three ways we create EDUtainment awesomeness!

1.) We Don’t “Preach” During Our School Shows

We hear about this one a lot. Many well meaning folks believe that to get their message across they have to “preach” at the kids. It doesn’t work.

We quoted a kid in another one of our blog posts. Here’s what they had to say:

“There was an assembly last year. Everyone was crying afterward because it was so like… Powerful… But nobody got the message.”

“Preaching” doesn’t work. The kids shut down. They raise their defenses. They stop listening.

This is a terrible situation to be in. You might as well talk to a brick wall.

We make our assemblies FUN! Yes, we want the kids to learn. Our primary goal is to get them to lower their defenses. Once they’re relaxed we can sneak past their defenses to share our messages!

2.) Our School Shows are Multi-Sensory Experiences

I’m ADD. Talk to me on the phone and you’ll quickly discover that I have a tendency to jump from topic to topic quickly. It’s hard for me to stay focused for more than a few minutes.

There’s a ton of research that supports just how powerful mutli-sensory learning experiences are. The more we can engage students on multiple levels at once, the better we’ll be able to share our messages.

In our Character All Stars presentation we teach kids about positive character. Instead of just telling them about good character, we create experiences that demonstrate what good character looks like.

All of our shows combine magic, humor, story telling, and audience participation to create a unique experience for every group!

3.) We Make Your Students the
Stars of Our School Shows!

Have you ever watched kids when they’re watching a TV or a movie? They get restless pretty quickly.

Even if it’s something they like they get up and start bouncing around. Have you ever wondered why?

IT’S BECAUSE KIDS WANT TO PARTICIPATE!!! They don’t want the experience to just happen “to” them. They want to be part of creating it! The easiest way to keep kids attention? Make them the stars of the show. Plain and simple.

A great example of how we use this is at the end of our EGGstraordinary Anti-Bullying Show.

We invite four kids up to participate in a mock game show. They have an opportunity to win fabulous prizes in exchange for answering questions about bullying!

The game show is high-energy complete with zany sound effects. Afterward when we ask kids what their favorite part of the show is they often tell us it’s the game show.

Guess what? That’s also the point where we drive home the core messages of the show!

Final Thoughts…

Creating school shows that are both powerful and fun is an art. These are our top three tactics for making them awesome, but there’s plenty more!

Interested in bringing our shows to your school? Check out our awesome school shows today!

We’ve made progress in the anti-bullying movement, but this video proves we still have a long way to go. This was recorded on a cell phone, so the quality isn’t that great. You can still make out what’s happening.

This incident took place at Unioto High School in Chillicothe, Ohio. The target attempted to walk away, but the bully beat him repeatedly.

This is unacceptable. I don’t care what your personal moral convictions are. All students deserve the right to a safe learning environment at school.

The bully received a three day suspension. This disciplinary action is understandably controversial. Many feel that it’s not sufficient for the level of violence depicted in the video.

What do you think? Obviously more violence isn’t the answer, but how do you think the situation should have been handled? What could have been done to prevent this from occurring in the first place?

Share your thoughts over at our Facebook page.

In 2011 we launched our Character Education School Assembly. We believe character education is critical to a child’s future success.

This was the subject of a recent New York Times article. If you only read one article this week, this is the one you need to read.

The article features David Levin, co-founder of Kipp Charter Schools. Their mission was to get 75% of their students, who were from low-income families, to graduate from a four year college.

Although they fell short of their goal initially, they made some interesting observations. From the article:

As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class. Those skills weren’t enough on their own to earn students a B.A., Levin knew. But for young people without the benefit of a lot of family resources, without the kind of safety net that their wealthier peers enjoyed, they seemed an indispensable part of making it to graduation day.

Wow… Just… Wow…

In other words being able to get an “A” on a report card wasn’t as significant to a child’s success as their character was!

The article goes on to talk about how students who excel academically often struggle after leaving school. They haven’t learned to recover from failure.

Here’s another interesting quote:

They found that at both schools, I.Q. was the better predictor of scores on statewide achievement tests, but measures of self-control were more reliable indicators of report-card grades.

With school funding tied to state tests, more and more schools have become laser-focused on test results. At what cost though?

Our schools are supposed to help students succeed. If good character is the best indicator of success, then shouldn’t we incentivize our schools to focus on character building? Isn’t that more important than an arbitrary test?

About This Video

Teach kids about “decantation” with this fast, easy to do card trick! The cards are randomly split into two piles. As if by magic the red cards and the black cards separate!

This is a really easy trick that requires no skill and very little practice. You’ll be able to do it immediately after watching the video.

Magic in the Classroom is an ongoing video series of tricks that you can use to engage and inspire students!

These tricks work nicely as a follow-up to our school assembly programs.

If you’d like to see more, just fill out the form below and we’ll send you an email as new tricks are released!

One group that’s easily overlooked in the bullying crisis is those with special needs. According to a recent article advocates in Maryland are calling on the state to do more to address the problem.

From the article:

Experts want officials to strengthen Maryland’s anti-bullying laws to provide more detailed rules for educators to follow in reporting incidents and more scrutiny in situations that involve sometimes-fragile students.

“They have targets on their back, and with a child who already has a disability, the damage can be greater,” said Ellen Callegary, an attorney and special-education advocate for more than 30 years, who is part of a coalition of advocates pressing for changes at the state level. “There appears to be an inability of school personnel to understand how deeply that is felt.”

This is something we’ve encountered frequently as we travel to schools with our anti-bullying school assembly. Students with special needs are easy targets and have more difficulty taking a stand.

One of the things that we teach students is to “make new friends” and “hang out in a group”. This is an extremely effective tactic because it limits the bully’s opportunities.

For a student with developmental disabilities this is easier said than done.

I recently spoke to an expert who works with special needs children. One thing she mentioned is that many times kids without special needs will try to befriend these students. Unfortunately they’ll be bullied by their peers for doing so.

In other words it’s a form of indirect bullying. Instead of bullying the special needs student directly, they’ll bully their friends.

The article goes deeper into the struggles that many families of special needs students have with bullying. Here’s one of the more telling quotes:

Margolis chairs the Education Advocacy Coalition, a group of organizations and special education experts that represents families of disabled students. She said the group has noted increasingly frustrated calls about bullying from parents of students with disabilities.

We need to prevent bullying for all students, including those with special needs.

About This Video

Teach kids about recycling with this torn and restored napkin trick!

Show a whole napkin. Then crumple it up into a small little ball. Wave a magic straw over it and like magic it has been restored! This is a super-easy trick to learn and share with your students.

Magic in the Classroom is an ongoing video series of easy to do magic tricks that you can use to engage and inspire students! These tricks make a perfect complement to our school assembly programs.

Want more? Just fill out the form below and we’ll send you an email as new videos become available.

Based on the media coverage, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the bullying epidemic is limited to the United States and United Kingdom.

It’s not… Bullying is a global problem and needs a global movement. This isn’t a national problem or a cultural problem. It’s a human problem.

It was recently reported that South Korea has seen an outbreak of bullying related suicides. From the article:

A RECENT spate of student suicides in South Korea has drawn attention to school bullying, with some cases hushed up to save the reputation of schools, leading victims to distrust their schools and teachers.

According to the Teenage Violence Prevention Center, 14,939 students have asked for help with bullying this year. Among them, 520 students considered suicide and 1,392 suffered from depression, the centre said.

In one shocking case, a bullied middle school girl was left suffering from severe post traumatic stress.

Another high school student in Seoul nearly died last September after swallowing several heart disease pills, but was saved when her mother found her.

Students often don’t report their problems until the last minute because they are afraid of retaliation and hesitate to tell their parents because of conflict with them, according to Kim Bok-in, a counsellor for bullied teenagers in Seoul.

This could have just as easily been a story in any of our local newspapers. Kids get bullied. They don’t know where to turn. The stress pushes them over the edge.

For me the most disturbing part of the article was this:

There was even a case in which a student didn’t receive help from his teacher after reporting his problem several times.

One of the things we encourage kids to do in our Anti-Bullying School Assembly is tell a trusted adult.

The problem with that is what happens if the adult doesn’t listen? What happens if they just brush it off and tell the kid to toughen up?

As parents, teachers, friends, and family members we need to be vigilant and take action when these reports reach our ears. The future of our kids all over the world depends on it.

Image by Emmanuel Dyan licensed under Creative Commons.

About This Video

Teach students about “Put-Ups” and “Put Downs” with this fun, easy to learn magic trick! Show an ordinary balloon, cut a big piece off it, then blow it up by magic!

Magic in the Classroom is an ongoing video series to help teachers like you integrate fun and exciting magic tricks into your daily lessons. It’s a great complement to our school assembly magic shows.

If you’d like to be notified when we release more great tricks like this one, simply fill out the form below! We’ll send you an email as new tricks are released.