Schuylerville Elementary’s Kindness & Caring Club has teamed up with Lisa Schwartz’s Social/Emotional Learning classes to “throw kindness around like snowballs!”
Every classroom in the building received a paper orange bucket and five paper snowballs. During SEL classes, Mrs. Schwartz encouraged students to choose five ways to spread joy and kindness by doing something as a class for others. Each time an activity is completed, students write it on a snowball and put it in their class “bucket.”
“There’s no contest and no prizes,” said Schwartz. “Students are simply doing random acts of kindness for others!”
The January initiative is an extension of the elementary school’s year-round Bucket Fillers Program, led by Elementary School Counselor Cassie Luthringer. Bucket Fillers uses the idea of filling a bucket to help children understand how positive thoughts and feelings help improve mental and emotional states—i.e., if your bucket is full, you feel confident, happy, secure and calm; these feelings often occur after someone has been kind to you. An empty bucket may cause people to behave poorly and in a way that “empties the buckets” of other people.
Fourth graders in Mrs. Daviero’s room completed their first random acts of kindness as a class, by creating a poster of thanks and delivering it to the school nurses to recognize all they are doing for students.
“During SEL, we have been discussing the importance of keeping the kindness, joy and overall happy feelings from the holiday season in our hearts and minds throughout the rest of the year,” said Schwartz. “Our January bucket filler activity has done just that.”