Our first meet and greet with Ms. Butler’s class was consumed with introductions. We asked the students about their hobbies and what they loved most. Some of the responses were:
Basketball
dancing
my Mama
rapping
my family
traveling
Papa K’s eyes lit up when he heard traveling- more about that later!
What better way to start bringing books to life than by reading Each Kindness by one of my favorite authors, Jacqueline Woodson. This book was so fitting.
In Each Kindness, Maya, a new student, joins the class in January. Instead of Chloe and her friends showing Maya love, she is rejected for many reasons, some more obvious than others. One day, they are surprised to find that Maya is gone.
Now it is too late to show kindness.
Papa K and I began a discussion about regrets. Then we posed a few critical thinking questions:
How do you treat a new student?
What is peer pressure?
Why do you think Chloe was so unfriendly to Maya?
Do you know what “hand me downs” are?
Define kindness.
What kind deed have you done this week and for whom--parents, siblings, neighbors, even strangers? Why did you do that kind deed?
As the students prepared to answer question six, we gave each student a small colorful rock and asked them to drop the rock in the kindness bowl as they shared their act of kindness.
A few students, one tearful, confessed that they could not think of a kind deed that they had performed. We talked about how it makes you feel when you act out the “Golden Rule.” Then we gave them the assignment to be prepared to tell us of their acts of kindness by the time we returned to read again.
We concluded with each student loudly reciting “The Kind Pledge” by Amy Richins. You could hear it all the way down the hall!
Then Papa K introduced his walking sticks from his many travels. He talked about his love for traveling and gave each student a picture of his walking sticks collection, including sticks from Egypt, Cambodia, and Jamaica, to name a few.
As part of our literacy series, Papa K will take the students on imaginary trips during his “Show and Tell” about his sticks. The first stick he brought was his Tennessee walking stick.
The students enjoyed listening to Papa K’s story and using their maps to locate Tennessee. It was the kick-off for our four book reading series on VOTING: starting with “Lillian’s Right to Vote.”