Five Ways To Make Your Classroom a Kinder Place

Welcome to our second edition of Teaching Tip Tuesday. We are making this a weekly event here at Inspired Teacher, and many weeks we’ll be doing giveaways to participants. Today, in fact, we are giving away a gorgeous vintage chalkboard for all who share a teaching tip in today’s link-up. So be sure to read through to the end of the post to see the details.

5 Ways to Make Your Classroom a Kinder Place

1. Go Marbles. Get a glass jar and a bowl of marbles {of course, use whatever you have}. Tell your students that for each kind deed you observe for one week, you will share it and put a marble into the jar. If all the marbles get from the bowl into the jar by the end of the week, give your whole classroom a surprise– no homework, rewards, etc. This is a fun, easy way to remind everyone to focus on kindness.

2. Random Acts of Kindness. Talk to your students at the beginning of the week about what it means to treat others with kindness. Give examples and talk about the joy it brings others. Then, give them the Random Acts of Kindness Challenge. Ask them to do something nice for someone else, in secret, and then come to class Friday ready to share about the experience. You can have them write a paragraph on it, tell the story aloud, or draw a picture of how they think the recipient of their kind act felt, for more learning. Keep this short and sweet by giving the students the assignment on Monday and completing it by Friday. You may need to brainstorm ideas as a class to get them thinking in the right direction. And remember, the key to this “mission” is secrecy! You can visit this page from HelpOthers.org for a list of kind deeds kids can do fairly easily.

3. Drop a Love Bomb. As a class, choose one person in your school who needs encouragement. It may be a principal that is stressed out, a student that just lost a parent, a new teacher that’s just started her job. As a class, think of a way to drop a love bomb on that person. It may be letters of encouragement, a host of blog comments, an act of service {helping the school janitor?}, small gifts that students donate, buying something at the lunchroom for that person, etc. The idea here is for the whole class to work together to shower kindness on a single person.

4. Pass the Compliment. Take ten minutes of class time and have students clear their desks of everything but one piece of paper with their own name written in large letters at the top. Randomly collect the papers and then pass them out again. Have students write one kind compliment about the person on the paper with that person’s name on it. Have students not sign their messages and continue to pass the pages around as you direct. At the end of the time, collect the papers, giving a quick glance for appropriate messages {you may have to give them out the next day}, and hand them back to the correct student. For another example of the power of this activity, check out the post, The Gift of Sincere Compliments.

5. Set a Secret Goal, and Tape It Somewhere. This simple activity can be done in a week or in a day. Talk to your students about kindness, and then ask each student to set a goal for themselves for that day or week regarding a person they’d like to be kinder to or a kind deed they’d like to do that day/week. Have students write a “code word” for that goal on a piece of white masking tape that you stick to their desks. {Older students might want to put the tape on a notebook/book, if they are changing classes and not at the same desk every period.} The tape will serve as a visual reminder of their goal throughout the given time. Students get to take off the tape and turn it in to you {possibly telling the story of their kind deeds} when they have accomplished their personal kindness goal.

And remember, teaching friends, always Lead by Example. Attitude is trickle-down. Be sure that you are leading the atmosphere of kindness with your words and actions in the classroom, in the teacher’s lounge, and even after school. Make it your mission to become a positive role model of kindness for each one of your students.

- Laura has a Middle Grades Ed. degree and blogs at aLifeOverseas.com.

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To celebrate Teaching Tip Tuesday, the lovely vintage shop CrabApplCreations is donating a shabby chic chalkboard for a lucky winning teacher. This gorgeous gift would make a nice addition to any desk! To enter, simply link-up a post sharing a teaching tip {either one your’ve written or one you’ve read}. You can link-up or leave a comment sharing your tip.

You can also get extra entries for:

*SHARING THIS POST via pinterest, twitter, or facebook.

*LIKING Inspired Teacher on facebook (sidebar).

*Following CrabApple on TWITTER at CrabAppl1

Post your link below, and grab our graphic to put on your own post, if you are including a post from your own blog. The more, the better, and come back next week to find out who won our lovely chalkboard and to participate in another Teaching Tip Tuesday!