Random Acts of Kindness

I start each year with lessons on the importance of kindness. This continues to be a major theme throughout the year and it has proven to be a huge piece in the success of my classroom community building. 

Last year, I went through the absolute hardest year of my life and got through it via the kindness of others. Through that experience, I realized that even the smallest act of kindness is huge. I now see my friends, family and coworkers as super heroes so I revamped some of my kindness resources using a super hero theme.

I talk more about the use of Random Acts of Kindness and my Kindness Tree in this post. 

Last year, I implemented Thankful Thursdays. at the end of the day, I gave students time to reflect on the week. They were then allowed to write down one act of kindness they witnessed that week.

In the beginning this was hard for many of my students. Our brains have a tendency to focus on the negative. And there were times in the beginning that some students could not think of even one nice thing that happened throughout the week. We talked as a class about brain science, growth mindsets and our how important it is to reflect on, and acknowledge the good in our week. By the end of the year, this was an activity the kids looked forward to and we all enjoyed our time thanking each other for being kind. Some days I would give them a prompt, most days I would let them free to reflect on their own.

Kids kept this Random Acts of Kindness in their binders- many of them as the cover of their binder and we would refer back to it throughout the year.