2020 Has Been an Exhaustingly Difficult Year
Throw A 2020 Kindness Party
Let These Ideas Start Your Creative Juices Flowing to Share Kindness All-Around
The impact of 2020 is going to resonate for years, especially in our children. We have social distancing and face masks most of the year. Besides the COVID virus, we’ve dealt with race tensions and riots, floods in the Southeast, and major fires in the West. As an educator, you can lighten the world by helping teach kids about the joy of kindness.
I am sure most children are like my teenage daughters who are so tired of zoom classes and social distancing. Even the mention of COVID will send my daughters high-tailing it out of the room. They are sick of 2020 and all the ills associated with it. Their mental health is suffering.
You can help kids find good in life, something to celebrate, a way for them to connect beyond the screen. For good mental health, people need social connections, a hope for better days, and an opportunity to serve. Why not meet all three objectives in a KINDNESS Party?
Planning: Ask around your neighborhood, your school, and most importantly your students – What things would they like to have in a kindness party? For those still working in virtual settings, brainstorm ideas to spread kindness even with the requirements of social distancing.
Some Ideas for Kindness Projects for Kids Could Include:
- On separate pieces of paper, have each student write one thing about every other student in the class that they like about them. Spend party time making a mailbox. For the last fifteen minutes of the party, have children deliver their personalized notes to individual mailboxes.
- Have a school clean-up party. Pick up trash around the outside of the school. Bag up the garbage and have a ceremony to let the kids give it to the principal.
- Make paper hearts. Have the children put random kind thoughts on each heart. Tape the hearts around the school.
- Draw a classroom secret buddy. Have the kids keep a kindness journal of each random act of kindness they do for their buddy each day. At the party, have each secret buddy reveal themselves by giving their buddy their kindness journal.
- Have the kids morph into kindness elves. Prepare a small note and take a flower to each of the specialists at your school. Make sure to include the reading specialist, media specialist, school nurse, office administrators, and school custodians.
- Work with a nursing home or assisted living center to set up a service project. The kids could wash the windows and wave at residents. They could make and deliver kindness cards. They could tape up random kind thoughts written on hearts outside the windows.
- Set up a week of random kindness challenges. To keep track of each child’s random acts of kindness, have the children anonymously write down on small slips of paper each random act as they do it. Collect the papers in a labeled container in your classroom. During your party, let the children take turns reading all the random acts completed by the class.
- You could set up a circle with numbered papers on the floor, like a cakewalk. Have as many numbers as you have students in your class. Play music, when the music stops, pull a number from a jar. The student standing on that number gets to read one of the recorded random acts of kindness.
- Throw a surprise birthday party for all the school’s custodians! Give them homemade birthday hats to wear along with handmade cards. Ask the custodians to tell them about their most memorable experience at the school rather it be cleaning up driblets of throw up down the hall or cutting out all the different game sections in the grass for all the fun field day games.
Kindness Party Ideas are Limitless
Your imagination is the limit for kindness activities for kids. Make sure everyone can participate with an opportunity to give and one to receive in your kindness activity. Get extra creative to make it happen virtually.
Play fun music. Incorporate movement. Allow children to talk and engage with each other. Kindness will ripple outward bringing hope to our world.
Article by Miss Jae