Year 2 Ponder: "Can you judge people by how they look?"

The children in Year 2 were faced with a difficult task this week when they were asked to place various photos of people into one of two categories:

1. Those who they deemed to be nicer people
OR
2. Those who they deemed to be not so nice people

The children quickly shot into action and worked as a group to complete the task. They pondered over their decisions and spoke to their group about their choices justifying their reasons.

"He has a bruise on his face so I think he's not so nice"
"She looks nice because she's smiling and is wearing a suit"
"Her clothes are all scruffy, is she hiding something in her bag?"

They then circulated the class to see if everybody else had similar views and spoke about any discrepancies. At  the end of the task, the teacher brought the class back together to then ask the big question...

Can you judge people on how they look?

To which all of children said no of course not... not realising that in fact, that is exactly what they had collectively just done. This was a huge learning curve for the children, realising how easy it can be to form opinions, both positive and negative, on others without knowing anything about them and without even realising you're doing it.

This led to a brilliant discussion about how we should treat others and how we would like to be treated. We spoke about how we can't assume people are 'good' or 'bad' based on appearances and how this links to how we treat others at School. We also spoke about 'stranger danger' due to assumptions being made that if someone looks "smart and smiley" they must be a good person.

"It made me think that just because someone might look nice and friendly that doesn't always mean they are and that if someone wears messy clothes it doesn't mean they're a bad person." Blake

"How you look is the outside, but it is what you're like inside that matters" Jersey

We ended the afternoon speaking about bullying and defined what is it and what it is not.
We spoke about the various forms of bullying and nominated class anti-bullying ambassadors to keep an eye out for any unkind behaviour.

"Bullying is when something happens more than once like if someone kept saying nasty things to you not just a one time argument" Moyin

However, as expected in Year 2, there is yet to be any cases of such a thing as they are all so kind and polite!

What a lovely bunch of children we have!