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:
how to self regulate and handle big emotions
ways to calm down
how to develop self control
how to develop self esteem
identify how they are feeling and discuss body control