December Virtue: Kindness

During the month of December, we focused on the virtue of Kindness. My favorite lesson from the month was Kindergarten. We read The Kindness Quilt by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace and discussed ways that we can show kindness both at school and at home through words and actions. The students shared their ideas of how they could show kindness to friends, siblings, parents, classmates, etc. We then created our own Kindness Quilt with paper. This lesson took a little bit of time to prep, but I think it was well worth it.

I took the quilt squares and mounted them together on a piece of butcher paper. The students were so excited when I presented them with their "paper quilt"!

Objective: Students will be able to distinguish the difference between kind and unkind words and actions and will be able to verbally and artistically describe kind acts.

Materials

The Kindness Quilt by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace

Paper "Quilt" Squares (I took 5x5 inch scrapbooking squares and cut a 3.5x3.5 inch square of white printer paper and glued the two together. Each quilt square had a different pattern.)

Crayons

Procedure

1. Ask the students to explain what Kindness is and how we show it.

2. Ask for examples of how we show kindness with our words (saying "please" and "thank you", not calling names, asking friends to play, etc).

3. Ask for examples of how we show kindness with our actions (inviting others to play, not hitting/kicking/etc, following directions, etc).

4. Read the book The Kindness Quilt. Discuss the examples of kindness from the book.

5. Allow students to share examples of how they can show kindness.

6. Instruct students to draw a picture of how they show kindness on their own quilt square.

7. After lesson, glue quilt squares onto a large piece of butcher paper.