Being kind is just such a beautiful thing to witness in a classroom. It just melts your heart when you see little scholars being kind to one another, but we need to build and encourage kindness in the classroom because it isn’t always easy to be kind. Some kids are just genuinely kind individuals and for others, well, kindness must be taught. I’m sure you can all picture a few kids in your mind right now! Encouraging kindness in the classroom is essential to every classroom. With these simple acts of kindness in the classroom, kindness will be blooming all over your classroom!
Acts of Kindness in The Classroom
To start off, to teach kindness is to teach others about experiences they may or may not have been through. A great way to teach this empathy for others is through books! Read-alouds are a perfect way to build kindness and teach empathy. It is okay to be explicit with empathy. Sometimes children need to hear and see someone being kind or showing empathy to be able to emulate it. Not every child will naturally just be empathetic! Even better, check out this blog post of some read alouds all about friendship!
Don’t be afraid of building a kindness challenge! Human nature makes us want to compete, so make the competition about kindness! Celebrate acts of kindness in the classroom by challenging students to complete them. When students complete a kind act, allow them to enter it into a raffle or make a bar graph. The visual will help remind students of the competition, but also remind them to be kind. A little extra incentive will help move the kind acts along and then just like anything else, once you do it enough, it becomes a habit! It is every teacher’s dream to have kindness be a habit for their students