Kindness Curriculum

Cultivating social-emotional skills such as gratitude, empathy, and kindness is essential in early childhood.

Self-acceptance is embracing who you are, without any qualifications, conditions, or exceptions. This activity explores positive affirmations. Affirmations will help train your mind to stop over-focusing on the negative and instead embrace the good, valuable, or positive about yourself the less desirable!

Exploring an attitude of gratitude requires students to look at their situations from a point of appreciation. Engaging in a class activity of ABC Gratitude helps students to identify people, events and surrounds that they are thankful for and reflect on the positives in their lives!

A positive optimistic attitude breeds positive outcomes and experiences for everyone. A negative attitude can be unconstructive and damaging to an individual and their friends and families. Conducting an inventory of attitudes assists in understanding the power of positive thoughts, recognising their impact and how actions can make a difference!

Understanding and feeling compassion is essential for healthy relationships and contributes to reducing incidences of bullying in classrooms. Exploring what compassion means through creating acrostic poems will provide students the opportunities to explore a word and its meaning.

The book, All Bodies are Good Bodies by Charlotte Barkla explores different body features and types. All types of bodies are celebrated – ‘bold and beautiful, loud and proud’. Through this fun rhyming book, the development of body acceptance, inclusivity and individuality is promoted building positive thoughts and attitudes.

Andy and the Lion by James Daugherty is a great book about a boy named Andy who creates a friendship with a wounded lion. Students can discuss why the lion was grateful to Andy and explore what gratitude feels like making meaningful personal connections.

Kindness is not just how you treat other people — it is how you extend those same behaviours to yourself! Small acts of kindness can have enormous benefits especially when you direct self-love to yourself! This activity investigates ways that people can be kind to themselves and acknowledge their value. Students will be encouraged to conduct a kindness to themselves and log their act on the Kindness Log at the Kindness Factory: https://kindnessfactory.com/kindness-log/

This thought-provoking activity gives students the opportunity to feel and share another person's emotions. Cross the line creates awareness of others’ experiences, perspectives and circumstances building a unified and supportive group of learners.

Perhaps the best way to teach the virtue of humility is to foster in our children a deep sense of gratitude. A sense of gratitude for even the little things can be expressed through thank you letters.

Having a positive attitude means being optimistic about situations, interactions, and yourself! Acrostic poems are a wonderful introduction to poetry for young students as they play and explore with words and there is no pressure to make it rhyme! This activity uses acrostic poems to explore the importance of a positive attitude and how it supports social and emotional wellbeing.

Can you flip something over while you’re standing on it? This challenging game, Blanket flip will require students to problem-solve, think creatively and work as a team to find a way to flip the blanket.