This teacher from Louisville, Kentucky, Stefany Bibb, is helping her students learn the importance of kindness.
She does this by providing a variety of creative outlets for them so that they can practice this pivotal life skill on a daily.
Bibb who teaches at the John F. Kennedy Montessori Elementary School created the Kindness Crew in her class.
The students who participate do different acts of kindness like holding the door for one another, greeting teachers and students in the morning with posters that have positive and inspiring messages, focusing on showing respect and helping out others, and reminding others of the importance of kindness.
The Kindness Crew: Filling the World with Kindness One Act at a Time
Bibb has been a teacher at this school for more than twenty years.
A lot of this time Bibb worked as a teacher assistant; however, she then got the needed certification and has had her own class for the last two years.
She explains that listening to her precious students talking about kindness and interacting with each other with a lot of kindness is so much more than what she had envisioned.
The Kindness Crew consists of students in every grade level.
This May, even the youngest kids from the kindergarten will have the chance to join the crew after watching the older children set up an example.
Kindness Feels Good Physically & Mentally
For Bibb, it feels good, both physically and mentally, to be kind.
The students practice the models at school, but they’re also encouraged to show this behavior at home too.
According to Aniyah Cox who’s in the fourth grade and a part of the project, spreading kindness is doable everywhere: whether it’s to your teacher at school or a family member at home.
Her favorite act of kindness is giving a hug. She enjoys making others smile and this lights up the world and she knows how warm others feel inside.
A fifth-grader, John Johnson, explains that his favorite act of kindness is holding the door for others because it’s a simple act of showing them how much you care.
Another fifth-grader, Kim Le, says that she’s planning on starting a Kindness Crew at her middle school next year.
She says that she’s not doing this alone and she firmly believes that the entire school can show kindness and the whole world. This is one step toward kindness in the whole world, she added.
The Kindness Rock Garden
Recently, several of the participants in the project painted rocks with kindness messages as part of the work being done for this project. In the period of spring break, Bibb called her students to spend some time creating a garden with these rocks in the school’s yard.
They named the garden the Kindness Rock Garden.
It’s beautifully arranged with rainbow-colored tires for sitting and pinwheels which move in the wind. The painted rocks come in different sizes and shapes.
The messages the students wrote on these rocks are motivating and the drawings are lovely.
Aniyah recently picked up one rock from this garden with a frog painting on it. She says the frog is cute and there is also a drawing of a fly. This made her happy because she loves frogs so much.
The students can keep a rock for up to a week before they put it back into the garden. If some of them want to keep it longer, they can paint a new one and replace it with the one they took.
The rocks can be gifted to friends if you want to make them feel good, according to Aniyah. This garden is only one of the ways the Kindness Crew is putting smiles on people’s faces.
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