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Spreading Kindness Within Our School

Working collaboratively with students and staff, a RUHS Kindness Rock Garden has been made to spread kindness in our school community! With all hand painted rocks with positive messages, and a beautiful handmade garden box. This Garden is at home in The Media Center of our school for all members of the school to enjoy. There is a second box residing in Mrs. Ingalls' room!

Spreading Kindness in Our Town

In a group of students from the Mindfulness and Movement class we spread rocks throughout the town! Leaving a trail of positive messages throughout our community for everyone to find!

Our largest and very first step in the creation of the garden, and spreading kindness, was painting the rocks! We painted rocks in advisories, callbacks, and even during class time. It was a wonderful experience getting to work and talk to everyone involved.

The first steps in building the box to contain our garden was getting the measurements for how big we want the box. The original thought was to have a larger garden, but the measurements we ended with are:

To cut the wood to precise measurements my mom taught me how to use the Compound Miter Saw in my grandfather's garage. A Compound Miter Saw is a large saw that uses a red line to show you where you're cutting. Using the 'trigger' type button on the handle you squeeze and push down through the wood! Though I recommend testing where the line actually cuts, I had a few failures after realizing it isn't 100% accurate... After correcting the mistake we were cutting precisely and ready for construction!

Next, I used a Screwgun to screw the boards together. This was harder than I had thought it would be because the wood was pretty hard to get through. I screwed all the sides together and to the bottom board that I recycled from my cousins failed previous project. Then I used little blocks as the legs for the box and used longer screws to screw those to the bottom. Which was also pretty difficult because of how they were placed under the box.

To pull the base of the box together (before decorations) I decided to stain it! I used stain in the color of Early American to compliment the wood's natural color. The smell of the stain was strong so I took this step outside. This was my final part of constructing the box and I was too excited to decorate so I used a flashlight when it got dark so I could decorate the next day!

This is the box after staining and during a little bit of decoration!

The decoration part of the garden went through several stages as I wasn't going off of a concrete vision. I based the look off of zen gardens I had found on Pinterest. Using sand, rocks, moss, clear stones, and lots of hot glue I created a gorgeous solid garden for our rocks to call home.

This was the first phase of decorating!

I started decorating by cutting the pad of moss (on left) to a more natural feeling shape, and covering some parts with other shades of moss. This helped to really create the natural look.

Pictured on the right is the moss pad after being cut and blended in with the other moss. You can also see the beginning of the waterfall here as I slowly glued multi colored glass stones up to create a waterfall.

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Here is a video showing the process of stacking the stones to create the waterfall!

After this step, I surrounded the waterfall with river stones and moss to create the illusion of a mountain and tie in with the natural bottom.

After creating the mountain for the waterfall it was time to prep for sand! I used hot glue to fill the cracks in between the boards so that the sand won't fall through and create a mess. Finally, I put the sand in and put the whole look together!

Finally, here is how the garden looks filled with all of the beautiful rocks members of the school painted!

Next in Mindfulness and Movement class, we took the rocks out into town and left them all over! It was a fun and enjoyable outing, filled with positivity. Have you seen any of our rocks in town?

Above are some of the rocks that have been left around town! Try and spot them yourself!

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