In the spirit of continuing the expression of love, the week after Valentine's Day is Random Acts of Kindness Week. Wixie is the perfect tool to help you celebrate kindness because it provides so many different ways for students to identify, dramatize, raise awareness, and practice kindness.
Here are a few ideas to inspire your activities to #MakeKindnessTheNorm this week and every week.
Identify what it means to be kind
Read a story about kindness to your students and ask them to describe or show what kindness looks like. Students can use a character traits cluster, or sentence strip to draw a picture of kindness in action and add words to describe what is happening.
For a different approach, have students create a Wanted poster to show what it looks like to be kind using synonyms and action statements.
Select each image above to open and assign the Wixie template.
What it means to actually act kindly to others isn’t always clear for many students. You may want to begin by asking students to identify something they would like someone else to do for them.
"Kindness is love made visible." -- M. Swanepoel
Read You Hold Me Up by Monique Gray Smith. What do I want? Have each craft a page in Wixie describing how someone else can "Hold me up" when they take a specific action.
Celebrate commonalities and difference
Read Five Creatures by Emily Jenkins. In this story, a young girl describes the five creatures in her family, comparing them using different characteristics on each page.
Using Wixie's Team feature, create teams of five students and have them work together to create their own Five Creatures book where they compare and share their similarities and differences through a data story.
Showcase each team's project to celebrate how all students are both similar and different at the same time.
Unfortunately, we often see differences as negative and only focus on the positive, but difference adds color and beauty to our world.
Read Todd Parr's It's Okay to Be Different. Then, have students choose one of their differences and state it proudly by finishing the sentence, "It's okay to..."
Learn strategies to calm down
It is hard to act nicely when we are angry. Explore strategies students can use to calm down, so their anger doesn't keep them from being kind. Use Wixie to create reminders about these strategies. Share or publish as posters, a movie to play on school television, trading cards or whatever your students think will work best.
Dramatize kindness with social stories
Social stories are often used in special education situations to help students understand social expectations, but these are powerful tools for all students.
Read Can I play too? from Mo Willems. This fun story illustrates a creative way to overcome a kindness challenge between friends. Ask your students to write their own social story to describe a time when they showed kindness.
Writing their own social stories also builds literacy and social emotional skills as students practice:
- describing events
- identifying feelings
- writing in first person perspective
- articulating positive actions they can take
Take action and practice kindness
The best way to celebrate Kindness Week is to take action and show kindness! Working digitally in Wixie makes it easy for students to express feelings and compliments using whatever combination of text, images, and voice that works best for them. Digital compliments and notes are easily shared too!
For example, you can ask students to use Wixie to craft a kind note to a classmate. Inspire your students with the "Love, Todd" messages author Todd Parr shares on Instagram. You can even encourage students to write their own letters in his style!
Get students in the habit of sharing compliments on a regular basis with other students. Students can use Wixie's High-Five or Compliment Cards templates to send a compliment to a classmate, family member, or even a neighbor.
Students can use Wixie's "print multiple" options to print several copies of their compliment, or compliments, on one sheet of paper. They can then simply cut out and share when they want to send a positive affirmation.
This is especially helpful if students aren't yet ready to take the risk of orally sharing a compliment, but want to leave one for a student who needs or deserves one!
Even just one act of kindness can make a big difference! Use these ideas to help student’s reflect upon and share what kindness looks like so we can all help make the world a kinder and better place!
