Spreading Kindness

December...It’s one of those months where I love and dread at the same time. I love how excited the kids are. I love how the weather changes for a bit. I love seeing all the decorations. I love the food. All these things somehow manage to change to me not loving it so much by about halfway through the month. I think one reason is probably because as a teacher one day in December feels like a whole month. When you must make it 16 days, you start to question how in the world it’s going to happen. One of my favorite things to do is learn about Holiday’s Around the World. Not only do we get to learn about different places and cultures (hello social studies) we also get to do many different art lessons, read stories and share our own experiences. Another thing that I have started is our Kindness unit, which I’m going to share with you.

I have noticed since Covid that one of our biggest struggles as a class (literally every single class since lockdown happened) has been social emotional learning. I teach first grade, so they’re still young, however other teachers have had the same issues no matter the grade. One thing we have struggled with is kindness and saying kind things to others. I’m not sure what happened or how, but the kids just seem to not be as nice lately. Again, not just one class, EVERY SINGLE ONE! I feel like the past four years have been a ton of social emotional learning and just basic life skills. The past two years in particular my classes have struggled with the concept of saying kind words. Two years ago, I don’t think they understood what kind meant even though we talked about it every day, multiple times a day, to the point where it was a struggle for me to be kind every day. Last year they were kind, they just didn’t get the concept of appropriate things to say. They never meant to be mean. We just struggled with compliments, what they were, and how to give them. We also struggled with being a cohesive class. We had “cliques”, not mean, just the groups didn’t really mesh. I decided to create this unit to help with classroom community and practicing SEL; Welcome to the Lighting Up Our Room With Kindness Unit.

Although I did originally come up with this to help solve some issues in our room, I did it based off a decoration idea I had. I love to create different fun bulletin boards in the room. I knew I wanted to do something with lights because our Holiday’s Around the World focuses a lot on light, something we usually end up discussing. I also thought it would be cute because my class at the time had been so excited to see the Christmas lights. They talked about lights for weeks! I from there decided on the name of the project we were going to do- Lighting Up Our Room With Kindness. From this I figured out how I wanted the board to look. My only problem was I wasn’t sure how to include the student work, or what I wanted the student work to be. Then it hit me, a book for each of them, practicing what we are learning, kindness. Once I had this, I was able to create everything and get my ideas into fruition.

I started out by making the bulletin board with the title and large lights that I cut out by hand. I hung that up before the kids came in one day and they were very excited. They asked what it meant, and we talked about what it means to be kind. We then read a story about kindness and talked about the ways kindness was shown. From there I broke them up into groups of four to five. I chose students who I knew didn’t work together normally so they would have to socialize and work together. Then we did our sorting activity. It was basic, plain and using what I had at the moment. This activity requires students to work as a team and decide if the slips of paper they received are compliments or not. I honestly thought this would be a quick check after our many discussions. I was wrong, which I am okay with. This activity became a much more involved lesson. It had so much discussion, critical thinking and teamwork. Once the students had sorted the sentences we shared as a class which were actual compliments, and which weren’t. It was surprising to see how some kids still didn’t get the concept all the way. You may be thinking how hard can it be? In the activity there are very clear compliments, very clear “mean” statements and then statements that are not mean, but they aren’t compliments. They are however statements that the class had said thinking they were giving a compliment to someone. So, it was a nice way to tie in their own thinking and figure it out. After we finished this activity, we hung up the compliments on our board. This stayed up the whole month of December.

Once we had learned and practiced compliments I introduced the best part of the unit, the books. Each day we wrote a page for a student in the class. We did two or three a day because we had a lot of kids and that year not a lot of time. Every student got a book at the end. Every student had 20+ pages of how awesome they are. I started out with an example that they did for me. It was a good practice of what can we say, draw, do, and use. From there we went through our class list. I would choose the students for the day. I made a slide where there was a lightbulb and when I clicked the name would appear. The kids started to guess before I clicked (reasoning and explanation became part of this lesson as well. So many standards we hit!) The next slide would have the student’s name and a 15-minute timer. I found this helped keep us on track and make sure that everyone completed. It allowed for enough time to finish but not enough time for anyone to mess around. I was very deliberate on the order of students I choose. My ones who I struggled with the most were some of my last. the kids had decided that if you listened and were good you got chosen. That was not at all what I did but it made them all seem to behave better; it was like our room version of Elf on the Shelf. I did my “harder” kids last because each day we would end up talking about the student beforehand and some get good ideas. Through this we learned about each other and things the kids had in common. By the times those kids came around the class already had good ideas about compliments they could give to these students. I was very happy about this because I didn’t want them to feel bad. I know that sometimes the others don’t say the nicest things to them, hence this activity.

When the rest of the class was writing a letter, the student was creating the cover of their book. It was their book so they got to decorate it however they wanted! I decided that the last page of their book was a letter from me. If I was going to challenge my kids to write something nice to everyone, I was going to do it as well. It was actually a great experience for me because there were quite a few students who I really struggled with and it made me stop and look at them as a whole and not just the student who drives me up a wall. I learned to appreciate these kids a bit more once I put aside my own frustrations. I loved seeing the amazing things the kids had to say about each other. It was very sweet and better than I had planned it to be. Every student got a book on the last day before winter break, and they were all so excited.

That first year was very basic. I wasn’t sure what the whole project would be like. Once I realized that I loved it, and the kids loved it I knew I needed to make it better. I changed a few things, added stuff and overall made it much cuter. Now it’s all included in the unit. The best part is that this doesn’t need to be a first-grade activity. It can be used to any grade you would like. Included in the unit is the pieces for the bulletin board, the sorting activity (but now as adorable lights, not strips of paper), kindness writing books and short videos that show how to put it all together. You get detailed step-by-step directions and all the copies you need. I have even included blanks so you can adjust the lessons to what suits your own class. The books have multiple types of writing pages, again for any grade you could want. Check out the unit at my TPT store. You can also see the videos on YouTube to get a better understanding of what’s included. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!