A new online story aims to help children learn the power of kindness, providing parents with a tool to help combat bullying. Oat the Goat or Oti te Nanekoti is a free interactive bilingual story aimed at children aged 4 to 7 years old. The story highlights the importance of being kind to one another.
“Bullying affects children’s health and wellbeing and contributes to poor education and life outcomes. Tackling it as early as possible is the most effective way to limit its damaging impacts.” Associated Education Minister, Tracey Martin.
Bullying-Free NZ Week
The Oat the Goat digital story is one of several bullying prevention initiatives aimed at children during Bullying-Free NZ Week. The Ministry of Education supports schools with resources via the bullyingfree.nz website and a Bullying-Free NZ School Toolkit, including a pack for parents, a guide for Boards of Trustees, training modules for staff, and a series of interactive classroom posters.
“This is another resource parents and teachers can use to talk to their children about bullying,” Tracey Martin says. “It’s cute and presented in an animated way which will appeal to children.”
Meet Oat the Goat
Cute may not be a term often associated with bullying but this story is more about kindness than hate. Beautifully illustrated and featuring native New Zealand scenery, quirky characters and familiar Kiwi-influenced wording, Oat the Goat can be read, listened to or watched. We highly recommend watching the first time, just to hear the narration by New Zealanders David Fane (Sione’s Wedding) and Piripi Taylor (Te Kāea present and the Māori voice of Māui in Moana). There’s even music by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
Oat the Goat is a beautiful story that your children will want to hear and read over and over again – and with an important message behind it, you will enjoy reading along too.
Read Oat the Goat: www.oatthegoat.co.nz
Read Oti te Nanekoti: www.otitenanekoti.co.nz
For more information, visit Bullying-Free NZ.
Read more on Kidspot:
- Definitions of bullying
- School bullying policies
- Talking about cyber bullying with your kids
- How to help when your child is bullied
My daughter came home from school with ‘Oat the Goat’ stickers and I asked her what Oat the Goat was, she said he’s a goat thats nice…. I’m glad to have a better explanation! She loved joining in with ‘Pink day’ at school and they are having an assembly on the importance of filling up others buckets instead of draining them! Its can affect a child so much to be bullied!
It’s great to see more resources being made available for kids, especially as they live in a technological world this type of thing will certainly appeal to them more (for some anyhow) than “old school” methods. It certainly is frightening just how many ways a child can be bullied now and how the bullying can follow them home in the form of online bullying, there is no break for them. I hope I have taught my children well enough not to bully but also given them the tools to deal with bullies.
We recently did pink shirt day at school and they talked about not bullying I showed this to my kids and they thought it was really good it’s great how they move and it can read to them I just helped turn the pages for them when it stopped talking. We then talked about how it was not nice to bully people.
Thank you for this article. Just watched a show recently and it talks about teen bullying and I’m scared of what the future can possibly look like for the next generation. It’s good that they talk about this at a young age, while not being too serious. The related links on bullying would be on my to-read list too.
The recent Pink Shirt Day was really good, my 5 year old came home and told me all about what is was for – bullying and then we spoke about what bullying was and how it can affect people. I always stuck up for people at school that were bullied as I couldn’t stand it. My now 24 year old son was bullied at high school and it affected him, he’s ok now but at the time it was really hard to deal with. This is a great idea.
Very cool my daughter has been getting bullied at school and the effects are not fair. She comes home angry then opens up after she’s got angry as I know it’s not normal for her to be angry as she’s very quiet and polite and shy. I will get her to watch this even if it’s her on the end of a bully and not bullying someone it’s always something kids like to see is a story with meaning.