Kindness Creatures

Kindness Creature design by a Kindergarten student

The three components of all Mind Move Make classes are mindfulness, movement, and visual art.  During this class I introduced the idea of Mindful Bodies to the group.  I enlisted the help of the students who have been a part of our class in the past to help me show this idea to the newer students.  I asked one of our returning students to explain what a Mindful Body looks like; she said, "Calm, quiet, peaceful."  Then I sat in a very dis-regulated way, with lots of movement and distracting my neighbors.  "Does this look like a mindful body?" I asked.  "NO!" all the children agreed.  Then I asked a returning student to show our group a Mindful Body.  He did a wonderful job, embodying stillness and calm.   After that, we all tried our Mindful Bodies on.

After that, we discussed showing ourselves kindness.  I asked the students two questions:

Why is it important to be kind to yourself?

Is it sometimes hard to be kind to yourself?

We had a great conversation about these questions.  Even though these students are very young, mostly Kindergarten, first, and second-graders, everyone agreed that it is sometimes difficult to be kind to themselves.

At the end of our movement practice, I asked everyone to lay on their backs with feet on the floor and legs bent and "windshield-wiper" their legs back and forth.  While moving in this relaxing way, I asked them to reflect on ways that they love themselves.  After that, I introduced the idea of the Kindness Creature!

A Kindness Creature is meant to remind us to be kind to ourselves.  How many of us need that reminder?  The Kindness Creature will be a stuffed animal, the base of which is a sock.  I showed the children a Kindness Creature that I designed and they were excited about the project, though many of them were skeptical about creating a stuffed animal starting with a mere sock!

Each child got to select a sock that they liked.  Some socks were patterned, and some were plain white.  After making a selection, the students traced the sock in their sketchbooks and designed what they wanted their creature to look like.  They also wrote and reflected on the thing they love about themselves that they thought about during the movement part of our class.  There were many whimsical, adorable designs!  Here are a few:

Kindness

Kindness is our focus for Mind Move Make's Winter Session.  Our Central Idea is:

 We can choose to grow kindness around us to make the world a better place

Some of the questions we are exploring together are:

What is kindness?

Why is it important to be kind to ourselves?

How can we be kind to ourselves?

Why is it important to be kind to others?

How does it feel when you are kind to someone else?

What actions can we take to spread kindness around us?

To begin this inquiry into kindness, we shared a discussion around the question: what is kindness? Together we read the book Be Kind by Pat Zietlow Miller to get our juices flowing around this topic. After we read the book and began our conversation, one first-grade student was late because she was confused about her new schedule. Right away, another student consoled her, sat with her, and told her it was OK. I also welcomed her, but it was the second-grade student's compassionate actions that made the difference between this first-grader feeling distraught and upset and settling into the new classroom. I pointed out that second-grade students was demonstrating KINDNESS IN ACTION! It was a beautiful way to start our class, actually seeing kindness manifest itself in a real-life situation.

Art-wise, the students designed the front covers of their sketchbooks. They had a choice between illustrating themselves doing something kind for another person, or drawing someone performing an act of kindness towards them. We had many interesting, colorful kindness drawings!

Here is a picture of the front cover of Be Kind by Pat Zeitlow Miller.  The illustrations by Jen Hill are gorgeous, filled with lush color.