Performing Acts of Kindness

Good deeds, gestures of generosity, paying it forward. Mindful actions intended to help another living thing.

Day 1 - Linking to Brain Research

• Our brains are built for compassion and empathy.

  • • Compassion - thinking of others, sympathetic of their problems .

    • Empathy - understand how someone else feels.

• As we become better at showing compassion and empathy we recognize that our words and actions have an impact on others.

• Being compassionate and empathetic helps us work and play better with others and control how we respond to situations.

• When we are kind towards and help others - WITHOUT looking for something in return - our brain releases dopamine - that good old feel good neurotransmitter.

We are hard-wired to feel good about doing good!

Give a Little Love - Youtube: 4:30

Discuss:

• What are some examples of selfless acts?

• Have you ever felt better after being kind to someone?

• Describe how you felt after.

• What do you think was going on in your brain?

Day 2 - Warm-Up - Kindness practice

• Display a chart with "Kindness Counts" in the middle.

• The teacher should give an example of how she tries to show kindness in her daily routine.

• What does kindness mean in your life? Write these responses on the chart.

Discuss:

• How does kindness look?

• How does kindness sound?

• What are some acts of kindness you have seen at school?

• How did they make you feel?

Day 3 - Engage and Explore - Three Acts of Kindness

prep: one blank index card for each student)

Engage:

• How much time does it take to be kind?

• Does it cost anything to be kind?

• Do you need any special tools to be kind?

• Who or what deserves our kindness?

• How do you feel after you've done something kind?

• Does it matter whether anyone compliments us for being kind?

• What is kindness?

Explore:

• Every day we choose how we will treat others.

• Kindness is a mindful choice, just like gratitude and optimistic thinking.

• When we are kind, we are seeing someone else's point of view.

• We understand how that person is thinking and feeling.

Now....

• Let's brainstorm a list of kind activities we could do to help other people at school or home feel good.

  • • • Hand an index card to each student.

• Write down 3 (realistic) kind activities you will do in the next 24 hours.

• Tomorrow you will have the chance to share how many you were able to make happen.

Day 4 - Reflect - Three Acts of Kindness - continued

prep: one piece of drawing paper for each student

Reflect:

• Pick one of the kind activities you performed during the last 24 hours and on a piece of paper, draw what it looked like.

• You can use thought or word bubbles to help describe the activity.

• Take turns sharing the activities you were able to do and how they made the recipients feel.

Discuss:

• Did anyone experience an optimistic feeling before or after their act of kindness?

• What role did gratitude play in your act of kindness?

Day 5 - Journal Writing I - Kind Comment

• Think of a situation, real or made up, where you say something kind to someone.

• Use this journal page to draw the situation in a comic strip.

• Write what you say and the other person's reaction in speech bubbles.

• Use the other person's name in your speech bubble.

Day 6 - Career Connection - Nurse

• What better profession can there be than one in which you are paid to make people feel good!

• Being a nurse can be both challenging and very rewarding.

• It provides many chances for acts of kindness.

I am a nurse - Youtube: 3:00

• What other jobs are there where the main focus is making people feel healthy and better about themselves?

Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.

J.M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan)

A gift that costs nothing rewards the giver with both happiness and health.

Day 8 - Kindness Decision Tree

• Now you know that one act of kindness can lead to another.

• Pay it Forward - doing something kind for someone where the only expectation is that they do something kind for someone else.

• What would happen if you helped MORE than one person, and each of those people helped MORE than one person?

• Try this math problem....

If you perform two acts of kindness on Sunday, and each of the people who received kindness performs two acts of kindness on Monday, and so on, how many acts of kindness in all will have been performed by the end of Saturday?

• Watch this video clip as a young boy puts 3 acts of kindness into action.

Pay it Forward - Youtube: 3:15

Discuss:

• How does this problem show the way the original acts "multiply" into many more acts of kindness?

• How does the tree structure make this a helpful model for this type of problem?

Day 9 - Kindness Paper Chain

prep: many strips of yellow, red, blue and green paper

• Each time you do a kind deed take one of these paper strips and write down what you did.

• When you are finished, had the paper to your teacher who will add it to your Kindness Paper Chain.

• Use this guide....

Red - kind things you did for people outside of school (home, on the bus, at a friend's house)

Yellow - for a kind deed you did for someone you don't know real well.

Blue - for kind deeds you do at school.

Green - for kind things you do for nature or the environment (recycling, animals, plants, water / energy conservation)

Day 10 - Literature Link