Character Strength of Kindness – Instructional Activities and Strategies

The following are a few instructional strategies and activities to help integrate the strength of KINDNESS into the culture of your classroom.

• Active/Attentive Listening – One of the most profound ways to show empathy and kindness is to listen with attention. Design a listening protocol based on the tenets of attentive listening that fits for the age of your students. Use this article and this one as a starting place with your design work to teach and embed active listening into the culture of your classroom. Look to integrate active listening into your Turn and Talk activities.

• Build A Culture of Kindness and Tolerance – Edutopia offers several activities. Also look to draw from the activities and lessons at Teaching Tolerance.

• Coaching Kindness – Present to the students the idea that you are going to be their kindness coach. As players on your team, they will learn skills and practice them. It will be important as for any team to be supportive of another with a positive mindset working as a team. Search the web for kindness and friendship making strategies. Put them into cards to draw from for your coaching sessions. Have a set protocol in how you will explain the strategy and model its implementation. Give students the opportunity to practice the strategy.

• Compassionate Classroom – Edutopia provides resources to help your students understand inclusion and tolerance. Also look to draw from the activities and lessons at Teaching Tolerance.

• Compliments Project – A lesson that also connects to gratitude.

• Growing Kindness from Six Seconds – Adapt this lesson to your needs.

• Inward-Outward  – Think of ways to be kind to yourself for your own wellbeing. Think of ways to share kindness to benefit others. Example: In- Make a plan for something that benefits yourself. Then do it! Out- Make a plan to do something helpful for someone else.
• Friendship Building – Reach into your teaching toolkit to pull out activities that help students grow their friendship making skills. Do read alouds from friendship making books, do role plays of ways to make friends, bring in active listening skills, make sure to have buddies for your new students… Use the four skills for making friends from Understood to give your students a framework to better understand friendships.

• Kindness Connection Corner – Have a wall area designated for students to write up narratives of how their teammates displayed kindness towards them. Connect to the idea of being a community where random acts of kindness is the norm. For younger students you could have them draw pictures of kindness interactions and/or you could post photos of them.

• Random Acts of Kindness – Help your students understand the impact of doing kind acts towards others. A helpful place to get resources is the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation (RAK). Start by setting up an account to download the free lessons organized by grade level or access them from this folder. Review other resources such as their kindness ideas database. This website is loaded with ways to highlight and nurture kindness in our students. Here is a list of 45 possible random acts of kindness. An additional strategy is to run a counting kindness activity in which you have a tally board in the classroom for students to simply mark it each time they experience kindness during the day. You can finish the day by doing a share out with students describing specific acts of kindness.

• See-Think-Wonder Thinking Routine – If you can find short videos of social interactions where kindness is displayed you can adapt this routine to help students deepen their understanding of potential steps one can take to be kind.

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