Make a Kindness Plan!

Title of Project: Make a Kindness Plan!

Schools and Teachers

Hemlock, Locust, and Homestead Teacher: Katie Forte and Alyssa Pinto-Abreu

ENL Proficiency Level | ENL Program | Standards | Technology

Entering, Emerging, Transitioning | Stand-Alone, Integrated ENL/ELA | KR9, KSL1a, 1W1 | Buncee

Assessments

Content: Students have written and illustrated two ways that they can plan to be bucket fillers.

Language: Students actively listen to a friend’s story in pair share and offer an opinion supported by at least one repeated detail of what their partner said.

Technology: Students have completed individual Buncee slides with at least 2 details for each category.

Description

Using the book Have You Filled a Bucket Today?, students will focus on kind words, actions, and active listening skills. This lesson will be used in conjunction with a whole body listening/ active listening lesson.

Content

I can be a “bucket filler” by creating a plan to choose kindness in different situations.

Language

I can listen to my friends, use kind words when I speak, and use those words to contribute to a class list of kind words.

Technology

I can use technology to help me express and organize my thoughts.

Procedure

First, students will read the book Have You Filled a Bucket Today? Students will then pull examples from the book that show kindness and generate at least two text-to-self connections. Questions include When have you felt welcomed? How has someone showed you kindness or helped you at home, at camp, at school? Can you think of different ways to be kind? After a brief group discussion of questions, students will work in pairs to practice active listening. (Active listening skills/ Whole Body Listening was reviewed in a previous lesson.) Students will share their findings from the pair share activity and then complete the first Buncee slide as a class. After, students will follow up by completing the next two Buncee slides individually, creating a kindness plan by listing two ways to be a bucket filler and at least two active listening/ whole body listening skills.

Resources and Other Materials

  • Digital Reading of Have You Filled A Bucket Today?

    • There are many read aloud options of Have You Filled A Bucket Today? on YouTube. You can pick the video for your classroom here.

  • Buncee Template

Reflection

It was truly a pleasure to create this project. While we were able to implement the first part of it; our students didn’t have the opportunity to complete their individual Buncee slides. The students were very creative in generating ways to be bucket fillers. They even presented mini skits in their classrooms about choosing kindness in their classrooms. In the future, an iPad could be used to tape the skits and then they could be added to Buncee.

We used Buncee, but this could have been done with Canva, particularly for older elementary students.