If November makes you think about the World Kindness Day ideas for activities you should be preparing for your classroom, you’ve landed in the right place! For more than 20 years, this annual event has been giving teachers an extra reason to pause and focus on how we treat one another in the classroom and out of it.
This year, the teachers on the Teach Starter team are here with our own kindness — a simple list of kindness activities for kids that you can use for World Kindness Day or store in your back pocket for another time when you feel like your students could use a lesson on adding just a bit more empathy and goodness to the world!
We’ve got you covered with fun and meaningful ways to sprinkle kindness all around the classroom (and community), which will have a lasting impact.
World Kindness Day Ideas for Teachers
As educators, it’s up to us to inspire kindness in our young students. We already do this daily, incidentally, as we help kids navigate their world, guide their social interactions, troubleshoot friendship issues and model empathy and compassion ourselves.
Consider our favourite kindness activities for kids some extra helpings!
Spread Kindness With Chalk
With the weather warming up here in Australia, World Kindness Day is a lovely time to take your kids outside with some sidewalk chalk and let them share the love with everyone who passes by your school.
Before going out of doors, brainstorm a slogan to write as a class, or break your class into small groups to brainstorm a plan for their group’s design. Students can also write kind notes individually or do something more simple like drawing a rainbow just to make people smile.
Add Kindness Decorations to Your Classroom Window
Is your classroom window visible from the nearby street? Make use of this viewability to spread messages to your entire community! Students can create messages of kindness like those above, or create rainbow art to make people smile.
With the end of the year coming up soon, making rainbows is a wonderful craft to use up any colourful bits of paper that you have left over.
Set Up a Classroom Kindness Jar
Being kind is an abstract concept, and it may be difficult for students to see the impact of small actions like picking up a classmate’s pencil or pushing in a neighbour’s chair. Make the abstract concrete with a classroom kindness jar. You can add a small item, such as a marble or pompom, each time you ‘catch’ a student being kind in your classroom.
Challenge students to be so kind that you fill the jar in a certain amount of time, with a reward to be earned for being so incredibly kind!
Put Your Kindness Detectives on the Case!
Visit the craft store and purchase a tree made with branches but no leaves. Introduce students to your classroom kindness tree and announce that there’s a mystery afoot—the kindness leaves have gone missing.
Challenge your students to sniff out kindness leaves as kindness detectives! Each time a student spots someone being kind, it’s their job to report it to headquarters (aka, you, their teacher!).
You can then note down the act of kindness on a paper leaf template and add it to a classroom kindness tree. The challenge is to fill the tree with so many leaves that you can no longer see the branches, restoring the tree to its rightful state.
It’s a bit of fun, but it’s also a good way to help students pay attention to the sorts of actions that constitute kindness.
Write Kind Letters to People in Aged Care Homes
This World Kindness Day activity is perfect for the upcoming Christmas season! Give your students a chance to practise their letter writing by creating special notes with kind messages to send to people in aged care homes.
If you’re teaching upper-year students, you might challenge them to set up a drive to collect magazines, DVDs, and other items that can be sent along with the notes. Students can practice their persuasive writing skills by creating posters to hang up around the school to promote the drive as part of the larger project.
Share the Bully a Plant Project
A few years ago, global furniture retailer IKEA released their Bully a Plant advertising campaign. Within days the campaign had gone viral on social media, and it’s just as good today as it was then.
Use the video of the experiment below to show your students the effects that the kind and cruel words had on two different plants. It’s an eye-opener!
Set Up a Classroom Compliments Centre
We all know how wonderful it feels to receive an unexpected compliment. It’s like a little gift that puts a spring in your step for the rest of the day. Why not encourage our students to give each other some build-ups, and get that good energy flowing through our schools?
Set up a classroom compliments centre with cards available for students to fill out. Once a week, set aside time to pull out some of the compliments and read them aloud to the class. Make sure you read the cards beforehand … just in case.
We’ve made it easy to create an eye-catching box with ready-made cards for students to fill out — download our Compliments Box Decorations and Compliments Cards resource.
Paint Kindness Rocks to Surprise Neighbours
Another way to spread kindness beyond the grounds of the school is to use rocks to spread your World Kindness Day message.
All it takes is some rocks from the playground, plus paint paintbrushes and Sharpie markers. The goal is for your students to write happy and encouraging messages on the rocks to make others smile, then drop them in spots around the classroom, school or out in the community to make someone’s day.
Make Kindness Chatterboxes
Kids love making chatterboxes, so put that energy into promoting kindness activities on the holiday.
This downloadable chatterbox template allows students to write kind acts they wish to complete on the inside of their chatterbox.
Create a Kindness Chain Reaction
This simple World Kindness Day activity can stretch to the end of term to encourage students to keep the kindness going. Set up a station with strips of colourful paper where students can write any random acts of kindness that happened to them during the week.
Before students leave at the end of the day, the new links are added to a Links of Kindness chain that is mounted to the classroom wall! How long can your chain get? Will it stretch all around the room?
Encourage Random Acts of Kindness
Little people don’t need to do anything big to have an impact. Teach your class about random acts of kindness, and encourage students to brainstorm different small ways they can be kind. You might even issue an official random acts of kindness challenge!
Reward Individual Acts of Kindness
This is not an activity per se, but it’s a good reminder. No matter how (seemingly) small, children’s acts of kindness deserve our recognition. Whether it’s a verbal build-up or a tangible reward — like one of these simple certificates — children love receiving an acknowledgment.
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