When I began this project, I never could have imagined the places it would travel and how it would grow! Elementary schools are the perfect place for studying and collaborating on kindness as a concept and an action.

First-grade teacher Rachel B. of Shorewood Hills, WI recently reached out to say she’d seen the For the One Who Finds Me project on the news and asked if her entire class could participate as they tried to complete 100 acts of kindness.

Rachel shared this background on the project her first graders took on:

The site I used was www.coffeecupsandcrayons.com/100-acts-kindness-kids. I used their list as a base to start a discussion about what to do and how to think, such as “bake dessert for a neighbor, tell someone how much you love them, make a get well card for someone, turn off the water while brushing your teeth, give high fives for a friend, etc.”

The vase project with you was our biggest outreach this year.  This is the first year I’ve tried this with my class in this form. This year, we focused mainly on showing kindness to our friends and teachers and school and our families and neighbors at home.  I gave suggestions and we tried practicing some of these things throughout our week and during the weekends.  When they had done one of the activities, they could sign their name onto a smaller task poster, and then we would add these to the larger list. We shared already made mini-posters with phrases like “Always Be Kind,” “Choose Kindness,” etc. We passed these out to teachers around the school and our friends, put them on our lockers, and also made thank you notes for these staff and friends through the semester.  Throughout the weeks, we would also meet and see where we had seen someone be kind on the playground, in the room, or at home.