The Kindness Project

The goal of the makerspace is not only to foster creativity, but to connect students to real world problems and solutions. Nothing is more engaging than when students are collaborating and working together to design and make something that will solve an authentic problem, while also uniquely showcasing their own learning.

The Kindness Project began in January 2018 with the help of our Digital Learning Coach Sarah Perkins. Our 4th grade students began to study kindness in the same fashion we would research any academic unit or topic. During the first three weeks, we researched kindness in a variety of formats: reading Jacqueline Woodson’s Each Kindness in small groups to build personal connections to fictional characters; watching footage from a professional MLB game of a boy their own age give away his own baseball to a disappointed young fan in a YouTube video, and dropping “pebbles of kindness” into a makeshift pond, discussing what those ripples in the water represent.

Next, students completed Google form surveys to help them reflect about their own “kindness” language, taking time to consider how they value kindness shown to them, and how it might be different for those around them, and even those closest to them.

Students then chose an adult in the Summer Street School community to interview, as a way to show students kindness can take thought. Students created google form surveys for the adult of their choosing, which included everyone from the custodian to the superintendent. Within this step was instruction and conversation about what makes a great question, as well as what information is to be gained from each question they wanted to ask.

Finally, as students synthesized the data they collected, they were required to design a creative project that will show kindness to their interviewed adult, as informed by that data. The creative project results are as different as each student. With the help of our music teacher, some students composed a song for faculty to get them through that post-lunch haze. Others are sewing, creating videos, or constructing items that will help a classroom function better.

For some, this study on kindness was a gentle affirmation of everything they already do as a friend, while for others, it was a welcome invitation to reflect on their own behavior and take time to show kindness to someone else. To then be able to spend the time to make something of their own design was even more special.