Kindness Theme Week

During Autumn 1, our Key Stage 2 pupils have taken part in a Kindness theme week – a special time to celebrate the power of being kind. Throughout the week, children enjoyed fun activities, challenges and discussions, which helped them learn about what kindness means and how we can demonstrate this every day, both in and out of school. 

Year 3 focused on how to build self-esteem and positivity through creating personal pocket cards of positive affirmations. They created a class kindness jar in their wellbeing areas to share all the times when they have demonstrated kindness throughout the year. Their week culminated in creating some fantastic acrostic poems using their 3 key words of the week – Kindness, Respect and Positivity.

Year 4’s focus was to learn about how kindness can help to build empathy and friendship. Through drama activities, the children explored what the effects of kindness might look like and then created secret kindness notes and positive affirmations to be hidden around the school and playground for their peers to find. They also completed special Kindness Bingo charts throughout the week and shared these at home.

Year 5 explored how to share kindness both within our school and the local community. As well as enjoying guided meditations and exploring what makes a healthy mind, their first task was to fill up their own ‘Kindness Buckets.’ Linking to the Age UK project, ‘Dear Christmas Friend’, pupils learnt the importance of spreading joy and compassion in the local community, by designing Christmas cards and messages for some lucky residents of local care homes. The children can’t wait to deliver these during the festive period.

Year 6 also looked at the importance of sharing kindness in the local community but with a focus on charity work. The children explored the local charity Sharewear, researching what they do to spread kindness through supplying clothing within our community. To support their invaluable work, year 6 will be holding a special clothing drive for Sharewear during the week of 24-28th November. Pupils really enjoyed creating their own multi-media advertising campaigns to promote this special community event.

Year 3

During theme week year 3 were challenged to consider why self-kindness is important to help build our confidence and self-esteem.

We began the week by exploring what kindness means to us and how it can be celebrated.  We worked together to create a beautiful kindness station where we can record acts of kindness we experience.  As a group we created a Kindness Agreement which will use as our guide for our actions and made posters to inspire kindness in others.

We explored how compliments can make others feel and spent time creating and sharing compliments for our classmates.  Then, using mirrors, we tried to pay ourselves a compliment but found it wasn’t quite as easy.  We talked about why it is harder to be kind to yourself sometimes and the impact that this can have.

As our understanding grew, we were able to visit the Affirmation Station and pay ourselves some amazing compliments.  Finally, we made ourselves personal compliment cards that we can read whenever we need a little boost to our self-confidence.

At the end of the week, we spent some time considering how kindness and respect work hand-in-hand to create a happy environment. We showed what respect means to us by creating some fantastic acrostic poems.

Year 4

This year our Theme Week was based around Kindness.  In Year 4  we had to explain why kindness is important in friendships, and especially on the playground.

We began by defining the terms friendship, kindness and unkindness.  We used drama to show what this looked like, sounded like and felt like.  We discussed ways in which we could show kindness and friendship even towards those children on the playground that we do not know.

Over the week we completed our own Kindness Bingo Card  showing what some acts of kindness we could carry out both at school and at home.

We then made kindness affirmation cards that we could leave in different parts of the school e.g. the dining room and playground to let people know that we were thinking about them and being kind.

Year 5

At the start of our theme week, we explored the definition of ‘well-being’ and looked at ways in which we can look after our own well-being and mental health. We also explore the ways in which we can stay happy and healthy. These included yoga, mindfulness yoga and affirmation colouring.

Next, we filled in a kindness log to track throughout the week when we had been kind and showed respect, both in and out of school. We took these home for the week to document our kindness.

The next day, we looked at positive affirmations. We created a kindness bucket for our wellbeing area in which we each designed a bucket and decided what positive actions would fill it. For example, holding doors open or inviting someone to play who looks lonely or left out.  We then created positive affirmations to put inside our bucket to give people’s self -esteem a boost when they have carried out an act of kindness.

Finally, we explored ways of boosting and spreading kindness in our community. We have signed up to the ‘Dear Christmas Friend’ scheme where we have created Christmas cards and written a special message inside to a member of a public in a local care home or hospital that may spend Christmas alone. We are hoping to get a few replies too!

Year 6

As part of our theme week on kindness, year 6 started by considering how we can be kinder to ourselves. We created positive affirmations to be displayed in the classroom that we can read whenever we are feeling a bit down. We have also discussed how to be kind to our local community, and we came up with the idea of organising a clothing drive for Sharewear. We researched what Sharewear do and the types of donations that they want, and then created a campaign to advertise our charity event through use of powerpoints, videos and posters. Watch this space for more details!