How to Spread Kindness - A Problem Based Learning Project
6:05 AM
Looking to bring more kindness in the world? Here is a project that our kindergarten class did last year that was extremely successful!
Every year we work on a PBL (project based learning). The big components of a true PBL project are quality content, 21st century skills, inquiry, a solid driving question, need to knows, voice and choice, revision and reflection, and a public audience. This is such a wonderful way to engage your students in learning across the curriculum and becoming 21st century learners!
We started with a driving question...How can we spread kindness into our world? (What a great question ~ and coming from 5 year olds? I always learn a lot from my 5 year olds!)
First:We brainstormed together and came up with this chart.(See below) We had been writing letters to each other during Daily 5 and realized how happy they made us...so that brought us to start writing to others in our school to make them feel good too! (So that is how we thought we could spread kindness at our school)
We brought a bag full of kindness books from our library
and discussed the character of each story and went over the similar traits the characters had in order to be kind. A few of our favorites books were: The Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig and Enemy Pie by Derek Munson. Then we watched Enemy Pie on video and then reread Enemy Pie by Derek Munson to take a closer look at what a good friend really is?
After discussing Enemy Pie and going over what the ingredients of a friendship pie would be, we wrote our own recipes. Click here for a copy.
Second: Then we talked about our home. How can we spread kindness at our home? We started doing chores to help our parents.
Third: We are so fortunate to have firefighters come in every month and teach us about fire safety. So we thought we would like to return the kindness to them in some way.
School After we had written grateful letters to our Principal, secretaries, custodian, and our 4th grade buddies, we looked a little further into how we could help our school be a kinder place. We found the buddy bench! But how were we going to pay for a buddy bench? So, we brainstormed even more and decided we could do chores at home and earn money towards this project!
The parents loved this idea and started sending envelopes with their chore
money to go towards purchasing the buddy bench. We also talked to our PTA
and our Principal to help fund the rest of the project! and ... WE did it! Here is our new
buddy bench for our school~
There are many types of benches, but this is the one we selected.
We created a video to teach the rest of the school how to use the buddy bench. Our parents came in to watch the video at the end of the year and were able to see it at our school. Community: For our final part of the project we visited the FIREMAN! Yeah! We each wrote letters to the fireman and delivered them in person!
by 2 Scoops of Kindergarten
1 comments
Love all the fun ideas and implantation. If you'd like a free mini- Shout Put game of 13 Service/Kindness ideas, see my blog. A full size game is also available on Teachers Pay Teachers with 31 ideas.
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