Student Contributor: M. O’Neel
Kindness notes are a great way for students to support one another in the classroom. Students are to draw a name out of a cup and write a nice note towards the other student. This helps students branch out and find new friends within the classroom.
Kindness notes are a simple and fun way for students to support one another in the classroom. Students are each given a sticky note and asked to pull a stick from the cup. Students draw sticks in order to prevent favorites or having any students left out. This should be once a week or everyday. The important thing about this tool is ensuring that every student gets a sticky note. Therefore as the teacher you should pick up the notes and disperse on their desks during lunch, recessed, or a prep period. This is to ensure every student has received a note, if a student has not then you can write a note to them yourself! I often write a note to a student each day due to absences or other students out of the classroom for extra support. I have implemented this twice a week into my classroom and the students seem to love it! This tool has helped students form new friendships, and reach out to friends they usually wouldn’t.
I’ve chosen to put Kindness Notes within the Supportive category. I think Kindness Notes fit best within this category because it allows students to support one another in a new way. These are little pieces students are able to take home or keep on their desks as reminders. The notes can vary from I like your shirt all the way to you’re a kind and funny friend. Kindness Notes are primarily student-led and can be implemented whenever needed within the classroom. I believe this tool has some relation to the preventive phase as well. Kindness Notes helps prevent students being left out or student cliques, but rather brings students together to build a classroom community. As a supportive tool I believe that this would fit bst under the Student Directed and Collaborative theory. I believe this because this tool is student-led in order to create a supportive classroom community alongside the teacher.
More Information –
Tool Source: I got the Kindness Notes idea from something similar on our tool website. I saw a tool called Tootling, where students could tattle using a sticky note and posting it on a board. I decided I wanted to use these materials to create a tool that is more supportive and kind for students.
A new tool that I implemented in my 6th grade middle school class was the Kindness Notes. This tool is used to help students find new friends in the classroom as well as boosting their own self-esteem because it is always nice to hear good things about yourself from someone else. For this tool it was pretty simple to prepare for and to teach all we needed to do was decorate an envelope with our names on it and pass out note cards for students to write compliments or nice things to each other. The students really liked this tool because they liked hearing good things about themselves and sharing good things about their peers. I noticed the class being nicer to one another and paying attention to everyone in the class because they had to get to know everyone in order to be able to say nice things about them.
This was a supportive category because the students were saying good things to one another and nothing negative, helping them focus on the good things about each other and not the bad. The students understood their role with the tool and they had to write a nice comment about the person they were given, not just their friends they know already. One thing that could be adjusted to make it better could be making sure that everyone gets a chance to share something nice with everyone else in the class.