Student Contributor -M. Blockhan
This project is a variation of the Kindness Rocks Project. Instead of painting kind messages on a rock, students will write notes to encourage and uplift each other. The purpose of this project is to show students the power of kindness and encourage them to spread kindness to others. Once everyone has written their notes, students will read them aloud to the class before hanging them up on a kindness wall in the classroom. The kindness wall will be designed and put up by the teacher before students complete the activity.
This project will begin with a brief discussion about what kindness is. The teacher will then help students brainstorm potential things they can say before passing out materials and releasing students to get to work on their notes. This project is a service to the community because it encourages students to spread positivity and treat each other with kindness and respect. Not only are students demonstrating kindness to their classmates, but they are spreading it to the rest of the school by displaying their notes in the hallway outside their classroom. Unfortunately, this project did not have as powerful of an impact on my students as I thought and hoped it would. Only one of the seven students was able to come up with something kind to say on their own. The rest of them struggled with the project and did not appear to get much out of it because, sadly, they did not possess the background knowledge needed to complete it.
The project did not go as well as I had hoped it would. Some of my students got really invested in the project and others struggled to get any words down on paper. All of them had trouble coming up with kind things to say, so the brainstorming section turned into me giving them multiple examples and instructing them to pick one to write on their paper. I realized that I should have come to class with more examples prepared because kindness comes so naturally to me that I was having trouble thinking of examples myself. My advice to others who may do this same project would be to ensure that students have a solid understanding of kindness and what it means to be kind to others before brainstorming ideas of what to say. In addition, I would encourage the instructor to have some examples and explanations of why the examples are good prepared beforehand so that they do not ending up having the same problem that I did.
M. Dogbe-
I did this project in a low-income school. The area surrounding the school happens to be very urban. I did this project with nineteen first graders. For this kindness project we decorated medium sized clear circles and then we wrote a kind message on them. Some students wrote, “you are loved” “you are the best” “you light up the room.” During the project we also had a lesson on kindness, the students learned what kindness is and why it is important to be kind. The students also offered up different ideas on ways to be kind that they could do in their community or schools. As well as the above project we displayed the students circles in the hallway outside of their classroom. This was so the rest of the K through second students in that hallway see the words of kindness. I also found some commonalities with how students progressed in finishing the assignment. My students were very invested in the creating part of the project and not the writing the message part. Some students were still decorating after 20 minutes, and it was time to go to recess. I helped my students create their kind messages by modeling examples. Then if they wanted to create one on their own, they were welcome to, but they could also use one of mine. I really like the fact that we used clear circles instead of paper, to give these students a new tool to navigate and explore. Having this new tool really peaked their engagement I knew. Next time I think I will make the circles larger for those students that have not been able to write legibly yet. I would also create a space for the kind message to go and tell students that that space cannot be written on they need to decorate around it.
S. Trull
I did my project with about 15 kindergarteners. What I had the students do was write two different ways of how they can be kind to others and/or the environment. Instead of having students write about what they can do to be kind to their classmates I had my students write two things about how they can be kind in general and why. Some responses ranged from how they can help pick up for their parents, how they can go around the parks with their family and pick up trash, or that they can give their friends a compliment. The students then would draw a picture to help describe what they were going to do to show kindness. What I changed in the project is the students did not hang their sentences/drawings they wanted to take them home instead. Some of my students struggled with this project and just coming up with ideas on how to be kind to others. I read a book to the students about kindness that had examples and we talked about a few of them, but next time I will write out examples, so students have something to refer to when looking for ideas. I would also change the layout of what I did for the project. I had students write sentences then draw on the same paper, but next time I will have them do their sentences on a completely different paper because they were so eager to draw and color, they did not want to finish the sentences.
Student contributor- E.Webber
This was a really fun and wholesome project that I was able to do with my students who are in first grade at Wellpinit Elementary school. The school that I did their civic engagement project with was in a rural area on the Spokane Reservation. I had both first grade classes partake in this fun project and overall there were 24 students. for this project we decided to spread kindness around the student community on the Spokane reservation by painting rocks. There was already another organization that started it in the school district, so I was able to partner with them and use their facebook page to track the rocks that were found by other tribal members. We showed some examples to our students first and let them brainstorm what they wanted to put on their rock to spread kindness. Painting rocks is one thing that we did differently in this project and the students had so much fun. Once the students finished their rocks we all went out on a hike around the community and placed them everywhere for other people to find, post on facebook and then have them place them somewhere else for the continuation of kindness. We also received some emails from administration and others in the tribe that loved this idea and what we have done around town. Seeing the students make these, place them and then to get comments from other people and post on facebook with kind comments on their post is just beyond awesome and it was amazing to see the students’ faces when their rock was found or their friend’s rock was found. An additional thing that I would have added to this project is printable for students to color and paste on there if they did not want to paint. I would have provided students with more options to put things on their rocks rather than just painting. The changes that I would make next time is that we make more rocks for students to make and place them around town and I would also make some of my own and place them around town before I take students to go places so that they can find some other ones when they are placing theirs.
I did the kindness project with five K-2 students, small groups in my resource room. I was able to take the suggestions given by Blockhan and implement them into my project. I started off with finding out what students know about kindness, provided a kindness definition and examples and then had students think of some as well. My younger students were given a template that started there sentence off with “You were kind to me when…”. Students brainstormed who they wanted to write the letter to and wrote a response to the prompt. After they were done, they were given an opportunity to draw a picture in their letter. Due to my group size and time of school year we did not make a wall with the letters. Instead, those that were written for the school staff, I had students personally bring it to them. Students who wrote to someone outside of the school I encouraged them to personally deliver it to the recipient.
My recommendation is to help students with writing if they need it. I had some who could vocalize what they want to write in their letters, but don’t know how to write it all down. I wrote what they wanted to say on their desks (you can use small white boards instead) and then have students write it on their own paper. Even with my group size I was able to successfully implement this project. I recommend doing the letter wall if possible before letting students pass out the letters. It adds an element to the project where it’s not just done and forgotten. The visual reminder provides an opportunity to go back and reference the project when needed.
D. Clemo
I did almost the same as this project with one class (approx. 20) of fifth-grade students at my Title 1 school. I did a very similar project with them where we did posters of encouragement, as they were finishing state testing for the year, and they are now getting ready to move to middle school, and a bunch of them were really apprehensive about how it would go. We used this as a time to link some real-world experiences and feelings to the Social Emotional Learning lesson that they had done the week prior about courage. Like the project above, my students struggled with coming up with ideas about what to draw/ write on their posters. However, unlike the project above, I only had to give two or three examples before the students seemed to kick into gear, and it was on from then. Many of the students were excellent artists, and they blew it out of the water with their posters. There were some that struggled, but not necessarily because of the thinking about what to put down part, but because what they were envisioning in their heads was not coming to fruition in reality. They still did great, by my standards, but by the ones they hold themselves to… they were none too pleased with their end product. I think next time, I would give students a heads-up the day before that we were going to do a project like this so that they could have more time than I allowed for brainstorming if they wanted it.