What Are You Grateful For?

This week in writing, we took a break from our normal lessons and took some time to reflect on what we are grateful for. This time of year helps us remember the important things in our life, and what we need to keep close to us during the holiday season. My 2nd grade students really enjoyed reflecting and discussing with each other what things matter most to them.

For this activity, we watched a quick video from Kid President called "25 Reasons to Be Thankful!" I love showing Kid President videos to my students, because he discusses important topics, but in silly ways that the students enjoy. In this video, Kid President shared 25 things he is thankful for. Some were silly, some were serious, but almost all were non-material items. After the video, we did a Kagan structure to share some ideas of what we are grateful for, especially non-material items. While it is important to be grateful for all of the wonderful gifts you get during the holidays, they are not the only things to be grateful for!

I was blown away by some of the responses the students came up with. After some discussion time, students went back to their seats to create Gratitude Chains. I have seen similar activities done before, but we decided to create this project so students had a reminder of things to look at and take home with them during the holiday season. This week, I had students each write 5 things that they were grateful for, and loop them all together into a chain. Next week, we are going to revisit the activity and add some more links to the chain. To remind the students of these important things during the next week, we hung up the chains on each locker so they could look at them each day.

Here are some of the things that 2nd graders are grateful for:

I hope during this holiday season we all can take some time and reflect on what is really important in our lives among the celebrations and gift exchanges. These 2nd graders sure did!