Building a culture of kindness, a culture of empathy, a culture of action in the classroom is a fine art. We often rely on literature as our craft- and it’s a powerful way to broaden a learner’s horizons, and extend thinking beyond the self.
What happens when chance lends an opportunity to show kindness at a local level? This week, we learned that the realness and the urgency to take action prevails in these cases, and learning becomes tangible for all.
Here’s how it happened: Early this week, a member of our learning community reached out to us about a local high school student who got hit by a car and needed to get his leg amputated. In her email, she told us she was encouraged to reach out to our classroom because she knew we did quite a bit around kindness. She had experienced our community wall, our gratuity messages, our giving-back Thanks-giving and Holidays. Kindly she questioned in her email, would we like to send a note of encouragement to this local boy?
This simple outreach put twenty sets of little hands in action: students created cards for the high school student, inscribing each with words of encouragement, calls for strength, and messages of love and hope.
As one member of our learning community put it so eloquently in words, “[…] it takes courage and strength to be expressive and tender and generous in spirit.”
An opportunity to extend our collective kindness. Another chance in strengthening the culture of kindness in our classroom. We are indeed grateful.
mpowerEDU 