In today’s assembly we heard the story of Jamario Howard who sent a tweet that went viral. Jamario lives in the U.S.A, in the state of Alabama, and had gone for lunch one day when he saw an elderly lady sitting on her own.

Jamario said that he approached the lady to see if she would like to sit and have lunch with him and his friends. The lady, called Eleanor, accepted his kind offer. She told Jamario that she was on her own because her husband had died and that today would have been their 60th wedding anniversary.

After Jamario posted the picture on twitter he said:
‘The point is, always be kind and nice to people. You never know what they are going through. This woman changed my outlook on life and how I look at other people. Everyone has a story so do not judge’

We talked about how this story was relevant to all of us at Bells Farm and how important it is to be nice and kind to others. We talked about how we don’t always know if someone is having a tough time and it doesn’t cost anything to be nice. It is important as no one should feel lonely or feel like an outsider in our school. Everyone should be made to feel welcome and should feel the kindness that we have at Bells Farm.

A few weeks ago we had an assembly about Stereotypes. We were shown a picture of different people and asked who would we would like to be our teacher and why. Some of us gave a variety of reasons – the person wearing a tie as they looked responsible, the women in the picture because a lot of our teachers are women. We were then shown the same picture again and asked to pick out who was the teacher, doctor, head teacher, criminal, mechanic and actor.

We found this a little harder and some of us made some interesting assumptions about the people in the picture. We learnt that we all naturally group people – old, young etc but we also learnt that sometimes this becomes a problem. It’s not the grouping that is bad. What can be harmful is when we think that everyone in a group is the same. We usually view stereotypes as being negative because they make assumptions about all the people in one group.

We talked about how it was important not to think a group of people is bad just because of the actions of a few in that group – we should learn more about people and situations before we judge them.