“There’s no such things as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.” – Scott Adams
This Wednesday, November 13th, is World Kindness Day! The resources below will help your students understand what kindness means and why showing kindness is important to making the world a better place. The resources below allow your students to reflect on what kind acts others have show them and how this has made them feel or transformed their mood and day. The resources also help students understand that one small act of kindness, like smiling at a stranger, can lead to much larger acts of kindness. If you do not get to these ideas this week, then try an activity anytime. Teaching students how to be kind human beings is a lesson that can be taught all year long.
Ideas and Resources
- Kind Acts Take One Flyers– Feel free to download and use one of these flyers I’ve created to post on your wall for students to tear off an act of kindness and accomplish by the end of the week. You can also quickly create your own with Poster My Wall, a free web tool for creating posters and flyers.
- The Random Acts of Kindness Organization lists several awesome resources for learners including these cartoon kindness posters, acts of kindness calendars for each month, and an entire curriculum for K to 8th grade students.
- Crowdfund Campaigns- Get students to create a social media campaign for a local cause and raise the funds. This is one of the student digital missions in my book, Hacking Digital Learning with Missions.
- Today my students and I wrote letters for Veterans, soldiers overseas, and first responders as part of Operation Gratitude. These heroes will get to open our letters and drawings and hopefully respond back!
- A Kindness Tree Project by PBS– The class creates a tree on one wall with examples, drawings, and photos of how people have been kind to them.
- Jen Wagner shares this awesome Be the I in Kind green screen project where students replace the I in Kind with a picture of themselves as part of a bulletin board.
- I love the ideas in this blog, 10 Kindness Activities for Elementary Students! Discover activities, such as a filling up a kindness bucket, resources to go along with the Make Joy Happen short video, and the Wrinkled Heart Activity.
- Check out the Acts of Kindness Lesson from Scholastic that helps students see how a small act of kindness helps their communities.
- Free Rice is a free game where students can answer trivia or multiplication questions and earn rice for hungry people around the world.
- Be My Eyes App is a free app that lets a blind person call you for help with tasks like helping locate an object in a room or car. The website has a video to demonstrate how it works. I downloaded the app and when a blind person calls me during class we can help them!
- Teachers Pay Teachers has several free kindness activities ready to print and use with learners. Some of my favorites include the Kind or Unkind Mini-Stories, Kindness Writing Sketch Note and Choices, and Kindness Bingo.
- A group of teachers and communities are also participating in #CardiganDay in honor of Fred Rogers and World Kindness Day! See the announcement here.
cross posted at teacherrebootcamp.com
Shelly Terrell is a Technology and Computer teacher, education consultant, and author of books including Hacking Digital Learning Strategies: 10 Ways to Launch EdTech Missions in Your Classroom. Read more at teacherrebootcamp.com.
