Teaching KINDNESS

Curation for MOD#4

Our school's mission statement:

"At Casorso Elementary School – École Élémentaire Casorso we work with parents, guardians, and our community as a whole to provide a positive learning environment facilitating the growth of the whole child to become a confident, collaborative, innovative, life-long learner, thoughtfully contributing to our community as appropriate to his/her age."

The focus of thoughtful contribution has spearheaded a goal to emphasize kindness this year as we implement "family groups" to encourage different student and teacher interactions throughout the school. As a dual-track (French immersion) school, there can often be a divide between the students and staff of the separate programs. Having "family groups", a blend of students from both programs in smaller mixed-age (K-6) clusters, lead by enrolling and non-enrolling teachers, is an attempt to create a closer sense of community within our walls. Children and teachers who otherwise would not interact are given a chance to do so through monthly organized activities. Mentorship can occur between older and younger students and these groups allow students to connect with teachers from other parts of the school. It is our hope to have these clusters carry on throughout the students' years at the school with new kindergarteners replacing the outgoing grade six students each year.

So teaching kindness...
We met with two other schools to discuss this theme in October during our district implementation day. During the presentation, I collected items, thoughts and resources that were mentioned into a Padlet that was shared and added my own resources when I got back to the school. I looked through the library collection to pull some materials that would help teachers continue working on the theme and link it to our monthly group meetings. The result is this Kindness Pearltrees:

Kindness, by ms_percevault

The materials and resources curated here serve several purposes. One is to give participating teachers a starting point of sorts, as this endeavour is a new one, the steering committee wants to ensure that it is low stress. Secondly, as there is no "kindness" section of the library, this grouping allows teachers to see what is offered and available.

I have offered a variety of formats to present the theme of kindness. Videos can be used as introductions to the theme and promote discussion. This could be useful to determine students' prior knowledge of the theme and their experiences with it. Picture books can deliver a powerful punch in a shorter time frame and is accessible to the younger members of the family group. Finally, the Sneaky Cards (used in conjunction to reading Ordinary Mary's Extraordinary Deed), Empathy Toy (with El Deaf and/or The Black Book of Colors), and RAK activities provide hands-on opportunities for students to put their energy into action. Students can approach this theme through discussions, art projects, thoughtful action, videos, play and observation.

Serafini (2012) describes the need for our students to be "reader-viewers", for them to be taught to hone their skills to not only look at the printed words but to be able to delve into visual representations and the design elements of electronic media.

"Teachers need to embrace these changes and find ways to incorporate the multimodal texts readers encounter outside of school into their classrooms and pedagogical repertoires." (Serafini, 2012)

It is my hope that having these resources will allow the teachers at my school to try some new things and present the theme of kindness in their family groups with multi-faceted splendour.

Work cited

Serafini, F. (2012) Reading multimodal texts in the 21st century. Research in Schools. 19(1), 26-32.