#inspire180days: Kindness Counts

After you have taught your rules, opened the door for communication, and worked on team building there is still one piece to the first week of school missing.

TEACHING KINDNESS!

I loved this quote and it made me realize not to forget this important part to the success of our classrooms.

Last year I started a kindness challenge and every week we tried to do one thing to spread kindness. I know you are thinking when did she have time to do this! We completed these acts for morning work and believe it or not they would ask to stay in for recess to work on their kindness challenge.

I began by having a discussion about what kindness is. We made an anchor chart that listed what they thought kindness meant.

Here is an example:

TIP: I like using visuals when making anchor charts so my ESL students have an image to see. After your students have said what kindness is you can later print out pictures that represent the words they used for them to refer to.

Next, I showed the video below and followed the lesson plan on The Ned Show. This lesson has great discussion starters and activities to pay it forward.

Then, I read the story Kindness is Cooler, Mrs. Ruler and followed the discussion questions and lesson from The Ned Show. They loved being able to share their writing responses and playing Pay-It-Which-Way that is all provided on the lesson plan.

Here is a link
for an online version
from youtube.

Sorry this picture
isn't the best but gives
you an idea of how I displayed
our acts of kindness last year.

This year instead of counting the first 100 days of school we are going to count 100 acts of kindness and place them on to a Kindness Counts wall. Each day I will write the act we will complete for the day on a heart and place onto the wall.

I also read the books below and completed some of the activities on The Ned Show kindness lesson plans.

Here is a link
for an online version
on youtube.

Some of my favorite activities from the Each Kindness lesson plan is the human pay-it forward chain, the pay-it forward kindness chart, and the ripples of kindness.

I love the story The Kindness Quilt and having the children to design a quilt that shows kindness to display in the classroom.

TIP: Remember these are all things that can be done through out the year. They don't have to be completed the first week. I like pulling these books back out when I see my class starting to exhibit behavior towards each other that doesn't represent kindness.

My last favorite kindness activity is the kindness rock project. This year I had my students design a rock that promoted kindness, inspiration, and love. We used rocks that I had bought from Dollar Tree. First, they painted them then used sharpies to finish decorating them. Then, they placed the rocks around the school to promote their love for the people inside our building.