Kindness Calendar

Each and every day teachers make decisions on what their students need most to learn and grow. Most often that relates to the content areas, but every now and then teachers identify a need for something else, something arguably more important.

Last week, the 5th graders took a break from our routine and spent all morning focusing on kindness. This is the focus of our school year. Everything we do is filtered through a lens of kindness. We have participated in many activities to start the school year and you could feel the eagerness in the students. Recently, both the students and teachers noticed a difference in the overall atmosphere of the classroom. In hopes of turning things back around, we decided to create a kindness calendar to encourage the students to be the best versions of themselves. They took this task very seriously, and it was extremely satisfying to see.

To give every student a voice, we used the structure place mat consensus. Each student had a section of a paper to jot down their own ideas of acts of kindness. Together, each team determined ideas that they all agreed on and wrote them in the center circle. These ideas were shared with all of the students and added to the kindness calendar. Each student received a copy of this calendar and we encouraged them to share it with their family. We look forward to watching our students perform these random acts of kindness.