How to Spread Kindness ~ Problem Based Learning

 

This might be the year to reinforce Kindness! A few years ago our kindergarten embarked on a PBL (project based learning). Here are the steps we took ....

We have done a few the past couple years, our Butterfly garden and our 5 Senses garden.  Our Kindness Project was our  PBL (project based learning) we worked on this year! 

The big components of a true PBL project are quality content, 21st

 century skills, inquiry, a solid 

driving question, need to knows, voice and  choice, revision and reflection, and a public audience. This is such a wonderful way to engage your students in learning across the curriculum and becoming 21st century learners!

We started with a driving question...How can we spread kindness into our world? (What a great question ~ and coming from 5 year olds? I always learn a lot from my 5 year olds!) 
First:We brainstormed together and came up with this chart.(See below) We had been writing letters to each other during Daily 5 and realized how happy they made us...so that brought us to start writing to others in our school to make them feel good too! (So that is how we thought we could spread kindness at our school)

We brought in a bag full of kindness books from our local library and 

read a lot of them. We discussed the character of each story and went over the similar traits the character had in order to be kind.  A few of our favorites were: The Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig and  Enemy Pie  by Derek Munson. Then we watched Enemy Pie on video and then reread Enemy Pie by Derek Munson to take a closer look at what a good friend really is? 






After discussing  Enemy Pie and going over what the ingredients of a friendship pie would be we wrote our own recipes. Click here for a copy.






Second: Then we talked about our home. How can we spread kindness to our home? We started doing chores to help our parents. 
Third: We are so fortunate to have firefighters come in every month and teach us about fire safety. So we thought we would like to return the kindness to them in some way. 

After Reflection we continued our kindness project:

School  After we had written grateful letters to our Principal, secretaries, custodian, and our 4th grade buddies, we looked a little further into how we could help our school be a kinder place. We found the buddy bench! But how were we going to pay for a buddy bench? So, we brainstormed even more and decided we could do chores at home and earn money towards this project! 

Home:

The parents loved this idea and started sending envelopes with their chore money to go towards purchasing the buddy bench. We also talked to our PTA and our Principal to help fund the rest of the project! and ... WE did it! A new buddy bench for our school~

There are many types but this is the one we selected.
We created a video to teach the rest of the school how to use the buddy bench. Our parents came in to watch the video at the end of the year and were able to see it at our school.
Community: For our final part of the project we  visited the FIREMAN! Yeah!  We each wrote letters to the fireman. I found a great letter from Seusstastic to use and created a cover for the letters. Then we delivered them in person!

This turned out to be such a wonderful project where not only did we use our academic skills but learned a lot about being a good friend and learning to spread kindness everywhere we go ! Please let me know if you have done a PBL that you can share with us. I would love to hear about it!