NEWSLETTER

At the end of each day our Kindness Leader shares moments when they saw friends being kind. Then they place a heart on the calendar to signify another day of kindness in our classroom. 

We read the book "The Things I Love About My Friends" to begin our discussion about kindness. We focused on what kindness is and described what it means to be a kind kid. Our goal is to identify as many ways of to be kind to others and to encourage the children to show kindness to others each day.

Exploring Kindness

Our kindness explorations will focus on learning about caring for others and ourselves, ways to show kindness and the language to use. The children are sharing moments in our class when they see kindness and children are recognized with a heart star for being kind. As we navigate our classroom environment and all of the kindness we can do and see, we also discuss people and moments outside of our classroom that may be kind.

Kind vs. Unkind

Together we viewed and discussed pictures of children being kind and unkind. The children described what we saw and we decided together whether the picture showed someone being kind or unkind. The sorted pictures were arranged by the children on pocket charts to provide a visual for our discussion as well as an interactive material for the children to play with. KIND had a "thumbs up" visual and UNKIND had a "thumbs down" visual to correspond with the word. This made the two words easier the children to "read" and remember.

Ways to Show Kindness

A surprise was under each child's number on the carpet today! Each photograph showed a person performing an act of kindness. The children described what they saw in the picture and shared how it was kind. Here is what they said:

Planting a tree 

Giving someone a Valentine/card

Playing together and having fun

Hugging and petting a dog

Collecting things to give to others

Giving a hug

Giving someone a flower

Holding someone's hand

Sharing your snack with someone

We began to introduce Self-Regulation and Big Emotions with our new "Feelings Check-In Chart." We'll continue next week and cover the following in our activities and discussions: