Kindness Connection

Starting during the 2010 - 2011 school year, Houghton Elementary School began celebrating the state-mandated No Name-Calling Day by engaging in school-wide activities that focused on kindness and acceptance. We renamed this day to Compliment Day during the 2010 – 2011 and 2011 – 2012 school years and Kindness Connection Day from the 2012 – 2013 school year on. Themes and school-wide activities are decided upon by staff members who volunteer their time to be a part of the Social Skills RTI Team, which meets at least once a month from September until February of every school year. The yearly theme is kicked off during Community Reading Day in November when community readers read selected books about kindness to all students. On the fourth Wednesday/week of every January, the theme is reintroduced to students on Kindness Connection Day/Kindness Connection Week by teachers and school staff in different ways depending on the year. We have had many themes over the years including creating a compliment chain that ran the length of the building, filling buckets with pom-poms that symbolized acts of kindness and encouraging students to be “bucket-fillers”, and creating kindness quilts where each student made a kindness square that was incorporated into a class quilt. Please peruse the tabs below to see pictures and learn more information regarding each year’s theme!