December: Kindness

During December, we learned about the virtue of Kindness. This is a great topic to talk about during the Christmas season!


2nd Grade: We read "The Recess Queen" and discussed how Mean Jean was unkind to all of her classmates. I copied two pages out of the book back-to-back, one with Jean being mean to her classmates, and the other with Jean making friends and being kind. Each time we discussed Jean behaving unkindly, I cut a piece of the "mean" picture until Jean was all alone. We discussed how being unkind cuts out all of our friends. After the story we discussed how Jean could get her friends back and each time the students came up with an idea, I taped a piece of the picture together. Once the entire picture was taped back together, I turned it around to show Jean smiling with all of her friends. The students got a kick out of the picture being double sided.


3rd Grade: We read "Have You Filled a Bucket Today" and talked about how we can all be bucket fillers rather than bucket dippers. After our discussion, I explained to the class that they were going to be in charge of a classroom bucket and their goal was to work on filling the class's bucket. I gave the class a plastic bucket and handed out small slips of paper for the students to write down random acts of kindness. I asked each student to write down one way that they could be kind to their classmates. They each put this pledge into the bucket and then I asked them to be on the lookout for classmates preforming random acts of kindness. Each time someone did something kind for them or they saw someone acting kindly, they could fill out a slip and add it to the bucket.


5th Grade: We revisited the idea of bullying and treating each other with respect. The students preformed short skits in small groups to illustrate different types of bullying and we discussed how this kind of behavior "tears us down". We then talked about kind acts that help to "build us up". Each student was given a paper brick to write down one way that they plan on building others up. I then created a "wall" of their bricks.





6th and 7th Grades: We focused on the concept of "paying it forward". We watched a clip of the movie and talked about examples of kind acts the students could preform for three people.