Expanding to Kindness and creating our song

Who: This activity is appropriate for elementary students, particularly at the intermediate level (2-4). I will be doing this lesson with my 1st and 2nd graders in particular.

How:  This is my lesson plan:

• Objective: Students will create something musical to help reinforce the idea of empathy and kindness.

• Through guided questioning, review the meaning of "empathy" from our last lesson.

• Act out Flora and the Flamingo one more time, as a kinesthetic reminder for showing empathy.

  • Students can choose to be Flora or the flamingo.

  • Pay attention to facial expressions (especially important to the story, since there are no words!)

  • Put on Waltz of the Flowers as movement music.

• Transition to "Kindness"

  • From the Character Strong curriculum

  • Definition: the choice to act with words, gifts or actions to bring appreciation, positivity, and encouragement to others and yourself.

    • Key point: kindness is a choice we make, every day!

  • Conversation Starters

    • What does Kindness look like in our home? What does it look like in our neighborhood? What does Kindness look like in our extended family, our faith or spiritual practices, our community centers, our sports teams, etc.?

    • Why is it important to show Kindness to people who aren’t kind to you?

    • What acts of Kindness have others shown you lately and how did you respond? How did it make you feel? How do random acts of Kindness help you grow?

  • Discussion:

    • What does Kindness look like in our home? What does it look like in our neighborhood? What does Kindness look like in our extended family, our faith or spiritual practices, our community centers, our sports teams, etc.?

    • Why is it important to show Kindness to people who aren’t kind to you?

    • What acts of Kindness have others shown you lately and how did you respond? How did it make you feel? How does random acts of Kindness help you grow

• "Color Your World with Kindness" video

• Create our own kindness/empathy song

  • Start with a "topic sentence" to base our song on and convey to listeners what our song is about

  • Brainstorm reminders we can put in our song for how to practice kindness/empathy

  • Once we have a list, with teachers help, start creating some rhyming verses (examples shown below)

  • Create a singable melody as we go

  • Accompany melody on an instrument you are comfortable with (I just used I and V chords)

  • Sing through our song and evaluate if it is conveying our message!

Materials: 

• Character Strong curriculum, K-5 Purposefull Pathways

• Waltz of the Flowers or other music

  • This was selevted from the "Kind" page in Scott and Stephanie Edgar's The ABCs of My Feelings and Music

• Flora the Flamingo book

• "Color Your World with Kindness" video from YouTube

• Ukulele, guitar, piano, or other accompanying instrument

• Means of writing and displaying for the class (I used Google Docs on a projector)

Supporting multimedia: 

First you will see my first graders' brainstorming list for how we can practice kindness:

Next, you'll see the start of our Kindness song. Students identified a "topic sentence" to introduce what our song was about, and then we pulled ideas from the brainstorming list and created rhymes.

Here is a recording of our song as it stands so far: