Student Contributor -A. Slotemaker
The Kindness Rocks project was originally started to spread kindness throughout a small community. It quickly grew into a project that encourages people to leave painted rocks with inspiring and kind messages along all paths of life. The mission of the Kindness Rocks Project is,“One message At just the right moment Can change someone’s entire day, Outlook, Life.”
The Kindness Rocks Project makes a difference anywhere from small communities, to a global scale. This project was created to spread kindness to strangers on any path of life, and quickly has become an excellent way demonstrate social and emotional learning in the classroom, and throughout the communities. Teachers and schools partner with the Kindness Rocks Project for the benefits of social and emotional learning that the organization brings into the classroom. Creating and distributing the Kindness Rocks creates academic success for students by, developing stronger social/emotional skills which improves academic performance of students, creating fewer behavioral problems because students are engaged in social/emotional learning to be less disruptive, and students develop positive social behavior and less emotional distress. The best part about the Kindness Rocks Project is, it not only creates a ripple of kindness in the community, but it benefits students on immense levels.
Teachers and students can partner with The Kindness Rocks Project by creating rocks and placing/hiding them around their school community, their neighboring communities, or even globally to soldiers, students, aid workers, etc.
(P. Hernandez)
I performed The Kindness Rocks Project with a group of college freshmen given I did not have access to children in K-12. Regardless, this project went smoothly and was able to be easily adaptable to an older audience. Similar to this post, we painted rocks with kind messages to hide around EWU campus with the intention of spreading kindness throughout the community. We also did this project during midterms week which was a great way to destress and spread encouraging messages to other students on campus. Different than this post, we initially did this project with the intention of only affecting the community of EWU, but we soon came to realize the greater impact it potentially had on a much larger scale. We became aware of the Spokane Rocks Facebook page where other people share rocks they have painted and hid or found and this goes beyond the community of Spokane. We even found some post of rocks found in Florida that were originally painted and hidden in Spokane! This was a great project to learn about the butterfly effect the impacts one small act of kindness can have on an individual both short term and long term. One thing I would do differently next time is incorporate the idea of tagging the rocks with @SpokaneRocks on FB so they can be tracked online, or even taking it a step further and creating our own EWU Rocks page and get others in our community involved in this project.
When I saw the idea on civic engagement website, The Kindness Rocks Project, I immediately knew this is what I wanted to do as a project. I have seen and heard about kindness rocks. I have even walked into stores that were selling them. I didn’t know there was an organization called, The Kindness Rocks Project. I didn’t connect this group, however I did give them credit in my PowerPoint. Instead of doing it with my classroom, I chose to do this project with my youth group. It turned out to be a little messier than I originally thought—then again, I was painting rocks with about 50 students of all ages groups, but it nevertheless it was a BLAST💥.
It is a fantastic civic engagement project and wonderful for several reasons. It’s great for social and emotional learning. It is beneficial for both people, on either side of the rock. The person who finds the rock— if they’re just having a bad day, it could make their day. I give an example of this: when you’re having a bad day and someone says something nice or gives you a compliment, sometimes it’s the best part of your day. Well the same goes for the rocks, when someone finds the rock and they’re having an awful day, it could put a smile on their face. It’s fun when you watch someone find a rock. For the student (or anyone) who is painting the rocks—it is therapeutic on a few levels. One – students’ doing something nice for someone else. That makes the student feel good in of itself. Two – it’s a way for students to calm down if they are angry, sad, or are experiencing anxiety. Three – it’s just pure FUN!! It is pretty much like you said. There are many reasons it benefits the students, that was just a few.
Personally, I did not think about sending the rocks away to soldiers or aid workers. That is a great idea. I just thought of putting them on teacher’s desks for when I do it with students. For the students who are not able to leave the school. I did this project with students from my youth group, so there was less complications with leaving the premises.
All said and done-I will always continue doing this project.
The Spreading Kindness Campaign 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 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.
A. Shomin
I did the Kindness Rocks project with a second-grade class, in an urban city, at a title 1 school. I had 20 students present that day. My students made art that was intended to spread kindness to others in the community, similarly to the Kindness Rocks project. I had planned to do the project exactly as it was on the website, but in talking to the principal of my school I learned that in the past year Kindness Rocks had been used to throw through the school windows, breaking them. Because of this there was a no Kindness Roco policy and I had to figure out a way to have the students create art to spread kindness, but in a way that did not involve rocks. I decided to get paper cut out in the shape of the book because we have been focusing on the book Wonder by RJ Palacio, which heavily focuses on being kind, and had students draw a nice picture, with a nice message, that the student made for a specific staff member in the building. I went to the office and put them in the teachers’ mailboxes. Because we were not doing this project with rocks, I also excluded having the students paint, so they could get more detail on their pictures. Next time I would like to find a way to have the kids deliver their cards themselves without it being a distraction to any classrooms.