This week we have reading about the power of kindness. Kindness, respectfulness and selflessness are all characteristics that I feel are very important for our students to understand and be able to demonstrate. Lately, I have not been seeing these characteristics lately, so it was a great time to review this information.
Today I presented my 8th Grade BEARS group with a Kindness Challenge. I began our time together by sharing with my students a couple of videos. The first one was Kid President: "How to Change the World (A Work in Progress)". Kid President always has such an inspirational message and the students really enjoyed this one (some of them were introduced to Kid President for the first time while others had seen videos by him before). The second video I shared with students was: "Thai Life Insurance" commercial that shows how the power of selfless kindness can affect so many people. I was touched by this commercial and knew right away that I would share it with my 8th grade students!
During my class today I had a student share a video with me that he had seen about the power of kindness. This video is called "Life Vest Inside - Kindness Boomerang". I was so happy that this video was shared with the class - and from one of their peers! All of these were very powerful videos and was a great entrance point to my challenge for them. I challenged each student to complete a random act of kindness by the end of the day tomorrow. I will be sending them a survey tomorrow afternoon asking them if they completed a random act of kindness, give a brief description of what it was, how many people it affected, how it made them feel, if they will continue to participate in random acts of kindness and if they enjoyed this challenge. My hope for this challenge is that students will take it seriously and will think about what they can do in school and our community to make it a better place for everyone! I am excited to see what responses I receive from students! I will report back soon!
LOVE IT! Random Acts of Kindness are so great to introduce and do with the children as often times they get SO STUCK on themselves and their problems....I, too, feel that it is my job to help them sort out great ways to act toward others.
ReplyDeleteUsing the power of a video is an amazing tool....it can it so much better at times than we can with words....and to have a student bring in a video means that it touched the right places in his/her heart!
I will start to do my "BUCKET FILLER" challenge with the students soon and I may use the videos you talked about as an introduction into BUCKET FILLING. The bucket filling books, might be something to also engage your students. They are full of ideas and descriptions about how to be kind and caring toward others.
Thank you for the "Bucket Filler" challenge idea - I will definitely look into that! I am glad that you will be able to utilize the videos as well! I thought they were really helpful at getting the "kindness" message out. :-)
DeleteWhat a great way to spread random acts of kindness, Brooke!! I'm looking forward to starting a new quarter on Tuesday... and to start the week off with ways to be helpful to others :-) I might be borrowing one or more of the videos you posted.
ReplyDeleteI hope the beginning of your second quarter is off to a great start! We will be starting our new quarter on Monday. I'm glad you found the videos useful too :-) See you on Saturday!
DeleteThanks for the Random Acts of Kindness video ideas, they were great. Last year during the month of March my class worked on Random acts of kindness. Here are a few of the activities the students enjoyed. Each student wrote a random act of kindness that could be done by a 5th grade student and put it in a jar. Each day the students picked out a random act of kindness piece of paper and tried to do it by the end of the day. The students kept a list of the random act they worked on all month. At the end of the month I had students reflect in their journals about how the month had went, which random acts of kindness did they like to do, which ones they didn't, and if they thought it was a good project to do again.
ReplyDeleteIn writing class, students worked on postcard telling another student 3 things that made that student special and then gave it to that student. These activities were great community builders and I am excited to add you videos to that unit. Let me know if you come up with anymore great ideas. I found a ton of ideas on Pinterest.
I love the idea of having students write down ideas and put them in a jar! I had initially planned to have my group make a list of Random Acts of Kindness that they could accomplish at school, but we ran out of time. I think that is especially helpful for those who may not be able to think of something. I love that pulling an idea out of a jar makes it completely "random" also. Thank you for the feedback! Oh....and I will definitely be consulting Pinterest for more ideas ;-)
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