Calling Out Kindness
A hug, a high-five, picking up a friend’s dropped puzzle pieces, cheering “you are so close, I believe in you”, or simply saying “thank you” are all acts of kindness that although simple have the ability to positively change another person’s moment, day, or life. It’s hard to know the impact your kindness will have on others and even the impact it can have on yourself. The ripple effect or perhaps the boomerang of kindness begins with one act—learning to do—saying or doing kind things every day.
Kindness is a choice and sometimes learners and even adults make the conscious choice to be unkind. This is tough, especially if you watch your child be unkind. Sure, a chat can help but over the last few weeks we’ve noticed that the more learners experience and receive kindness the more they want to give. Kindness is a muscle. The YouTube sensation, Kid President, inspired learners this week to use their kindness muscle by sharing 20 things we should say more often. His cuteness not only made us all laugh but inspired learners to make their own lists of kind and unkind words for the Spark and Discovery studios.
Kind sayings that made their rainbow lists included “Keep trying!” “If you can do this, you can do anything!” “Please” “Thank you” “You’re a hero that is unstoppable” “I love that you work so hard” “Everything will be okay” and more. As you could imagine the unkind lists included curse words, potty words, and “You’re not my friend” “You’re dumb” “You’re mean”. We all agreed with the age old bunny saying by Bambi’s Thumper “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”
Throughout the week we’ve definitely heard and felt a shift and just yesterday during Quest project time I overheard one learner comment on another’s marble run creation “you really tried hard here, you’ve got something good, you just have to keep going.” The muscle was working!
Kindness, although a core essential to life at Acton and in society, is just one of many qualities of character that learners are developing. Qualities of courage, teamwork, leadership, patience, helpfulness, resilience, and more are all growing too and every Friday learners engage in the ultimate kindness ritual, a practice called Character Callouts! If your learner hasn’t shared already, Character Callouts is an opportunity for learners to call out other learners for something amazing they did and and name the quality of character they exhibited. These acts aren’t just playing nicely at recess, instead callouts are moments that had deep meaning to a learner. Callouts are an opportunity to kindly give thanks. Perhaps this week as your family celebrates being thankful you consider trying our Acton Character Callouts at home. Just remember to seal it with “one, two, three KINDNESS” or which ever quality you are honoring and be sure to follow up with a clap, it’s way fun!