Nineteen Minutes

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

ACTIVITY: “You Can End It”

In this activity, students will design, share, and display posters that help spread awareness about bullying and ways to prevent it in their school and neighborhood.

Along with being one of the central themes of the book, Bullying is what instigates most of the story’s events—from the incessant bullying that Peter faces at school growing up to the alienation between Josie and Peter.

Based on your takeaways from the novel and the surrounding discussions, create a set of three posters to help spread awareness about bullying and how to prevent it. The posters should include information about the harmful effects of bullying and ways to address it as a target, bystander, and even potential perpetrator in addition to general anti-bullying sentiment.

• Talk to people of different ages and backgrounds—peers, teachers, and family members—to understand the different kinds of experiences people have had with bullying.
• Research some national organizations and campaigns that have successfully helped prevent or reduce instances of bullying and identify the resources they offer.
• In your final poster designs, incorporate your findings through compelling and relatable content that clearly depicts your message.
• Present your posters to the rest of the class, then display them in appropriate places in your school and neighborhood.

After the posters have been shared and displayed, reflect in writing on your classmates’ posters: What was most compelling about each one? Which ones moved you to care about the issue and to potentially act, and why?

Teaching Suggestion: You can encourage students to think about indirect ways in which bullying can take place; having them collect stories from a variety of people may help them see this, too. You could also help guide their work by emphasizing how the effectiveness of the posters’ messaging takes precedence over aesthetics.

Differentiation Suggestion: Students who struggle with written expression may benefit from using collage-work, photographs, or graphic art to create their posters. They can also offer their thoughts on their classmates’ posters verbally, rather than as a written reflection.