There are two kinds of bullying: physical and emotional. Physical bullying includes hitting, punching, and fighting. Emotional bullying includes gossip, shutting someone out, name-calling, and cyberbullying (bullying that happens online).

Bullying has one purpose: to exclude—or leave out—someone from a group. When someone is bullied, he or she is made to feel unwelcome and unwanted. Sometimes witnesses to bullying don't intervene—stop the bullying—because they are afraid they will be bullied and excluded, too. This could happen in a school, neighborhood, camp, on a sports team, or anywhere else.

In this lesson, you will explore bullying as a failure of democracy, which is the political system we have that guarantees everyone equal rights. You will also think about how young people can support or fail to support democracy.

Goals
Here are the big ideas you will learn about in this lesson:

• Bullying stops people from feeling free to participate in their society and hurts our democracy.
• People may prevent bullying by speaking out against it.

Strategies
You will be using many reading and writing strategies to complete this lesson. The key strategies that you will focus on are:

• Making inferences
• Determining important information
• Categorizing basic facts andideas
• Constructing summaries
• Making connections

• limit
• society

You will now watch two videos. The first shows several people talking about being bullied and about being a bully. The second video shows a public service announcement—a short movie—that students made about how to intervene to stop bullying. As you watch, think about the reasons kids bully, and the conclusions their victims draw about their own self-worth.

Click "View" on the left to watch the videos.

One girl who was bullied says, “I felt worthless, like who I was I shouldn’t be.” Write two to three sentences describing how this feeling might limit her participation in school, sports, or other groups.

This video defines cyberbullying—insults, name-calling, and other bullying written on Internet sites or through email. It describes how to handle it, and how it can get people into real legal trouble. As you watch, ask yourself: Is cyberbullying different from face-to-face bullying? If so, how is it different?

Click "View" on the left to watch the video.

Is cyberbullying different from other types of bullying because of the effect it has on its victims? Write two to three sentences explaining your answer.

In our democratic society, we are free to live the way we want, as long as we follow the basic rules of our society.

You may think your role in our democracy only applies to government: voting, protesting, or being a politician. But democracy begins at home, at school, and online. The way we treat the people in our everyday lives determines whether they can be free to be who they are in our society—in our schools, on sports teams, and in our neighborhoods.

In this lesson, you have learned how bullying impacts a society by limiting people's participation in their community. Now you will read more about how bullying takes away people's rights.

Click "View" on the left to begin the reading.

How do you think bullying affects a society? Write two to three sentences to support your answer.

You have seen and read how bullying hurts a society by making people fearful and giving power to those who want to do harm.

Now show what you have learned so far about bullying and democracy by answering these three questions. Be sure to save all your answers before you go to the next screen.

You will now check your understanding of the vocabulary words for this lesson by placing them in sentences. Click "View" on the left to begin the activity.

Before moving to the next screen, choose two words from the vocabulary list and write a new sentence for each word.

Vocabulary words: cyberbullying, democracy, intervene, limited, society

As you have learned in the videos and the reading, bullying is a problem because it gives bullies power over other people. Think about what you have learned about bullying and how it affects our democracy. In this activity, you will learn more about freedom of speech, which is taken away from people who are bullied.

Click "View" on the left to begin the activity. Your teacher will review the answers with you.

Then, before moving on to the final assignment, you may want to watch this lesson's videos again or reread the passage.

What Is Bullying?

Video: 0m 51s

View

Stop Bullying Now!

Video: 4m 00s

View

Bullying Online

Video: 1m 55s

View

Democracy Starts at Home

Document

View

In this lesson, you have learned about how bullying limits people’s rights in a democracy. You have also learned how small actions in our everyday lives make a big impact on our society as a whole. You will now write an essay that shares what you have learned and what you think about it.

Begin by reviewing your notes. Click "review my work" above and view or print out the screen that pops up.

Final Assignment Instructions

• Download Bullying—Final Assignment (PDF).
• Choose one of the topics in the PDF and write an essay.
• Organize your response so that it includes at least three supporting details that you have learned from the reading passage, videos, and other materials in this lesson.
• Use at least three vocabulary words (or a form of the words) as part of your supporting details. For example, for the word jump, you could use jumps, jumped, or jumping.