Telling the Students

To jumpstart the month of December, read the book Kindness Counts by Brian Smith. This story chronicles a young boy's experience with random acts of kindness and how his feelings about kindness changed the more he saw and participated in kind acts around him.

For many of our students, this was the first time they had heard the phrase random acts of kindness. How was this different than just being nice? Why was it important to do intentional and random acts of kindness? These questions sparked conversation between students as we delved deeper into this mindset of being kind to others.

Due to a fire drill, our lesson was cut short, but we had just enough time to unveil our main project: Each student would receive a $10 bill to cover the costs of doing a random act of kindness for someone else!

Oh, if you could have only seen their shocked faces and squeals of disbelief!

"Wait... what?"

 "Did she just say..."

 "You mean REAL money?!"

Mrs. Cross and I delightfully replied, "YES!" We explained that the Hanover Education Foundation had awarded us with funding so all the students in our class could create projects of kindness, then share what they had done. The children were SO excited; they couldn't wait to get started!

We sent a formal letter home to parents explaining our purpose, including a space at the bottom for photo permissions as we share our projects in person and online. Less than two weeks later, we had 100% parental support of our project! JOY! We look forward to seeing our students shine with their creative kindness!