This project was one of MANY that we have used to try and promote kindness in our class. My class has been caught in a cycle of wanting to get revenge when someone is mean and as you can imagine, that does not really lend to the kind of class I want. Our kindness project started with an act of kindness from my mom, who sent us a box of fabric and embellishments. We used these to design a kindness flag. My mom had even used her sewing skills to sew the word kindness, and students could add these to their flags. Students were asked to be creative when designing their flag and use the sewing skills we had learned at Christmas. It is amazing to see them go from not being able to thread their own needle to being independent sewers. On the back of their flags, students were asked to write their wishes for kindness for our class and the school. I then sat with students in small groups, or one-on-one and asked them questions about the importance of kindness and how they could help to promote kindness within our class and school community.
Overall, I was really impressed with the results. On Friday I took a digital media workshop and learned how to use iMovie and to do something called Appsmashing, which is where you use more than one app to create. So for my video, I used music I created in Garage Band and then opened it in iMovie and added it as the background music for my video. Before Friday, my only experience making movies was using Windows Movie Maker, and I rarely added video, audio, and photo clips. I have really been trying to learn new things on my iPad so that I can feel comfortable getting my students to use these. I find it difficult to ask students to use a program that I am not comfortable with myself. Unfortunately I cannot post the video here as some of my students do not have permission to be online, so it will be more to show to my class. I think I will try and make another video that just shows the finished product as well as has some of their answers dubbed over the pictures.
Basically, I am trying anything I can think of to get my students working on being kind to each other; it has been a continual focus since the beginning of the year. I think eventually it will start to sink in as they see the changes in people's attitudes toward each other. When interviewed, they did say that the activities are helping, so yay!!