Confronting Bullying: Literacy as a Tool for Character Education

Bullying is a major problem in American schools, and there is no simple solution.

• Every day, 160,000 children across America stay home from school for fear of being bullied.
• Some 30 percent of all students are involved in the bullying cycle in the role of aggressor or victim. Or as both.
• 60 percent of former bullies have a criminal record before age 24.
• While male bullies are most noticeable because of outward physical aggression, girls also bully one another, often in insidious but equally vicious ways.
• Even the bystanders of bullying are affected by watching as violence is inflicted on others.

But you can do something about it, and in Confronting Bullying, Roxanne Henkin shows you how to make school a safer place for all children. Henkin takes you inside classrooms where reading, writing, and character education have helped to reduce bullying, showing you how children's literature can generate dynamic class discussions on aggression and harassment while writing assignments give students an opportunity to acknowledge and explore their feelings about bullying as they consider its ethics.

Confronting Bullying offers practical features including:

• tips and suggestions for implementing anti-bullying lessons into your planning
• a list of helpful anti-bullying web links
• specific lessons to help you get started
• a comprehensive, annotated list of children's literature with more than 200 titles sorted by topic and theme and usable with a wide range of ages and reading levels.

Bullying is intolerable, and it replaces joyful learning with fear and violence. Make a difference in a kid's life. Read Confronting Bullying and make strides toward a learning environment where learning about respect, tolerance, and trust not only helps students learn how to read, write, and think, but helps them reduce the influence of intimidation.