How does kindness connect us?

The grade 1’s in Ms. Hutchings class and the grade 2’s in Ms. Jones class worked together on an inquiry to answer the question “how does kindness connect us?” As part of our inquiry, we studied Todd Parr books. Todd Parr books teach us a lot about feelings and the importance of kindness and being yourself.

Todd Parr inspired art

                            

We also read other books and watched some videos that teach us about kindness. Here are some thoughts students had about kindness throughout our inquiry:  

“There was a boy on a skateboard who fell and someone helped him. He felt happy so he wanted to help someone. Then they wanted to share happiness.”

“The two kids were bullying the guy when he fell. It made me think about being bullied when I started school. It made me feel sad and angry. I feel like happy when someone includes me in tag.”

“When my brother was playing all by himself I played with him. After I gave him ice cream. And we shared.”

“I am kind because I really like helping people”

“Sometimes when my friends got hurt I get them an ice pack.”

“They are happy because they are taking turns and having fun.”

We did a top-secret acts of kindness mission in our classrooms. The teachers put all of the students pictures in a bag and drew out a friend to do an act of kindness for. The teachers recorded each student revealing who they did an act of kindness for and we watched the reveal video together. We then spread our acts of kindness to the whole school. We made bookmarks with nice messages and hid them in books in the learning commons to find, we did some cleaning and organizing jobs throughout the school, and we made some cards for the adults in the school. We also decided that we wanted to make a “buddy bench” at our school. A buddy bench is a designated bench that students can sit on at recess if they don’t have anyone to lay with. We thought we could be leaders at the school and invite kids who sit on the bench to play. We wrote a letter to Mrs. Zelmer and Mr. Patry to suggest a buddy bench and we did a maker space challenge to build bench prototypes.

We also wanted to do some writing around kindness. We read “The Important Book” and modeled our writing around this book. We looked at some examples and had some time to share our ideas with peers before beginning our writing.

We had a celebration of our learning at an assembly this past week.