Student Contributor: N. Pierce
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The kindness chain is an activity where all students are writing down kind, positive, and encouraging messages for their peers on a piece of paper. At the end of the activity all the students have a list of these notes to keep! This helps build classroom community as well as self-confidence for students.<\/p>\n
For this tool the whole class sits in a circle, each student is given a piece of paper and writes their name at the top. Then the teacher will give the directions. The students will all pass their papers to their left and look at the name at the top of the page, then they will write a kind note or something they appreciate about that person (the teacher can tell them it\u2019s ok to just write something a little more generic if they feel they don\u2019t know the person super well- encourage students to get to know these students better!) Then after a timer of 2-3 minutes goes off everyone passes their paper to their left again and the train continues until each student ends up back with their paper. Then they have a page full of kind and encouraging words about themselves! I have done this is a work setting as well as in one of my high school classes and it was really encouraging to get to read all the notes at the end. People noticed things that I wouldn\u2019t have ever said about myself, and it made me feel really good. I also enjoyed getting to write the kind things about other people and see how happy it made them in the end.<\/p>\n
I chose to put this tool into the supportive phase because it helps to build the community of the classroom. When each student gets their list of kind notes it is going to build their confidence as well as their connection with other students in the classroom. It is also encouraging students to notice these traits in other students and to share those thoughts with another student to build them up. If students can start to see how all their peers look at them, and all the good things they notice, it can help students feel more welcome and comfortable in the classroom. When this sense of community is established in the classroom, students can start participating more freely and task greater risks. I would say that at first this activity is collaborative. The teacher gives the students the activity, but it is all up to students to write their own thoughts. Eventually the goal of the activity is for students to take over though. This is when it would be more student centered, students would share the things they notice or just kind words on their own to build up others in the classroom.<\/p>\n
More Information –
\nTool Source: Randy Cornwall- Colville High School<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The kindness chain is an activity where all students are writing down kind, positive, and encouraging messages for their peers on a piece of paper. At the end of the activity all the students have a list of these notes to keep! This helps build classroom community as well as self-confidence for students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3632,"featured_media":974,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[7,8,9,3],"class_list":["post-973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-supportive","tag-3rd-5th","tag-6th-8th","tag-student-directed","tag-student-directed-collaborative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/managementtoolbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/managementtoolbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/managementtoolbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/managementtoolbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3632"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/managementtoolbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=973"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/managementtoolbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":975,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/managementtoolbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973\/revisions\/975"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/managementtoolbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/managementtoolbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/managementtoolbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/managementtoolbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}