(FEBRUARY 2023)—Valley Stream UFSD Thirteen’s Willow Road Elementary School recently completed the Great Kindness Challenge, an activity created by the global not-for-profit organization, Kids for Peace. The platform welcomes young people to actively participate in leadership, community service, arts, environmental stewardship, and global friendship.
The weeklong challenge engages students in different themed activities each day centered around the global theme of kindness. For example, on Wild about Kindness Day, students went “wild” about making hearts of appreciation for their Willow Road teachers and staff. On Bucket Filler Day, students colored in their bucket worksheets and wrote kind thoughts and feelings to read to their fellow classmates.
Other daily themes included Work Out Problems with Kindness Day; Throwback Kindness Day during which students worked on creating messages of kindness to be displayed throughout the school; and Kindness Rock Day which had students focusing on being kind to themselves and creating posters that featured their talents and positive traits.
To end the Great Kindness Challenge, older students partnered up with their kindergarten buddies to brainstorm various kind acts for Be a Rainbow in Someone Else’s Cloud Day, and all students in the school worked collaboratively to create a large kindness poster for the school.