Acts of Kindness

Continuing our conversation from yesterday around the topic of thoughtfulness and kindness was so natural this morning when Radha  arrived at school with her mom.  A few weeks ago Subha  mentioned that she loves to sew and that if we ever needed anything in that department for the classroom that she be glad to help us out.  We talked about wanting to change the seat covers on the comfortable chairs in our Library.  Subha graciously offered to take on this project!    Today she surprised us with our new, beautiful chair covers!
After Subha left for the morning, we felt that this was a perfect opportunity to continue yesterday's discussion about kindness at Morning Meeting.  Our conversation led to thoughts of ways we can express our appreciation when we receive acts of kindness from others.    A few of the children's ideas were:

• give them a hug       
• say thank-you
• tell them you love them
• draw them a picture
• take them to Chuckie Cheese 
• write a message and put it in an envelope and put on a stamp and mail it

We decided that the idea of writing a message would be a wonderful way for us as a group to express our appreciation to Subha. We created a large Thank -You card and at Choice Time, the children had the opportunity to collage feathers, tissue paper and decorative paper on the card.  This communal, group art experience helps the children learn to work collaboratively and cooperatively with each other.     When the artistic part of the card was completed, we felt that writing a message was a meaningful way to support our Language and Literacy component of our program. Later in the day, each child had the opportunity to work with a teacher individually and think about the message they wanted to express in our class thank-you card.  The children's thoughts and feelings were recorded in the card and collectively we created a thoughtful message.  The children were so proud of their  collaborative work together and decided that they wanted to surprise Subha when she came to school to pick up Radha.

Needless to say, Subha was very touched and the children had the joy of experiencing first hand the gifts of giving...