Teaching kindness is essential because it creates a warm and welcoming classroom atmosphere where everyone feels valued and respected. When students learn to be kind, they develop better social skills and form stronger friendships, making school a more enjoyable place to be. Building kindness has to be a part of the day in an elementary classroom. Let’s discuss some ways to implement an understanding of kindness for children at the school.
It Starts with You! – Be the Model: Show students kindness in your words and actions. This could be if someone hands you something and you respond with a response such as, “Thank you for handing me my pen that dropped on the floor.” Have a smile and be genuine with fist bumps, side hugs, words of affirmation, and encouragement. Show kindness each day.
Group Discussions: This could be a morning meeting or an after recess huddle, but somewhere in the day when you are working on social-emotional learning discuss kindness. You can point out kindness you saw today, and invite kids to share if someone was kind to them, which may be called a compliment circle. In a compliment circle, students sit in a circle and take turns complimenting one another. Have an anchor chart that points out what kindness is and looks like.
Picture Books: Reading to students (even older students) quality picture books, can drive home characters’ actions and the outcomes of their actions. Reading aloud can help foster discussions and deep thinking about what kindness is and why it is important.
Role Play: During my time as a general education teacher and now in special education, I can see such a big difference role play makes especially for students who have a harder time showing empathy and kindness. When working with students that have more severe behavioral needs I found one of the best tools was to role-play different scenarios. Of course, this has to be done when they are not in behavior and done consistently. Some students need to practice saying and doing kind things for it to stick in a real-world situation. Last year, I role-played how to say I’m sorry with one of my students who just would not apologize even if he accidentally bumped into someone. We worked on it over and over again. He was doing a great job at role-play but never did it during a real event. After about 2 weeks of working on role-play with the class. He FINALLY said I’m sorry! Boy, did we celebrate! Role-playing for students who don’t have severe needs is just as important. You never know what a student’s home life may be like and some may need to participate in role-playing so they “get” what it means to be kind. Role-playing for kindness does work!
Give students a scenario “S” and a Role-Play “R” action to act out showing kindness in different situations.
Kindness Challenge / Incentive: I have been seeing so many “star jars” on websites lately for classroom incentives. I thought having a jar for kindness would be a highly impactful and motivating tool for classroom management. Having a way to recognize acts of kindness and rewarding students for doing the right thing would be more tangible for students to understand how to act toward each other at school and in their community. This “Caught Being Kind” Kindness Jar has everything you need to set up a kindness incentive to build more kindness in your classroom.
Kindness Tree: Create a tree using paper and have students write or draw acts of kindness they have performed or witnessed on leaves or add hearts. Then, students can hang the leaves or hearts on the tree.
Let me know if you are interested in my top 5 picture books to teach kindness, or comment below on one of your favorites!