Kindness ALWAYS Matters! SEL Kindness Unit for Social Emotional Learning

Developing Social Emotional skills is an essential part of student learning. Facilitating and navigating kindness with first graders can be challenging, but our efforts are so important! Spending time in our classrooms on activities and conversations that focus on teaching children the importance of being kind to others is time well-spent.

My SEL: Kindness Unit is interactive and filled with a variety of kindness oriented activities. I use it throughout the school year starting with back to school, continuing through World Kindness Day in November, Random Acts of Kindness Day in February and on through the end of the school year. It's always a great time to be teaching kindness!

You might be familiar with this unit, having seen it mentioned in this Classroom Community post from a few years back. The unit has been updated since then for a cleaner look, which has helped students and teachers.

 Using original poems, a Kindness Pledge, printable practice pages, teaching projectables, RAK cards and a family letter, this unit:

- defines what kindness means and why it's important

- teaches children different ways to show kindness, such as through words, actions and gestures

- reads and discusses books suggested for their themes of kindness

- has students performing random acts of kindness in the classroom, at home and in the community

- discusses kindness in a variety of settings

This unit has had some wonderful feedback from teachers who have used it in their primary grade classrooms.

• We used this resource throughout the year. Any time we needed to talk about kindness in our class, I went back to this resource. There is so much included. I liked the book recommendations as well.

• It's awesome to use when teaching lessons on kindness and respect towards their classmates and other students in school!!!! A couple of parents let me know that their child came home talking about the poems and other things we talked about while using this unit!!

• This was the perfect resource to use to form a classroom community! We also used it during kindness week!

• I am looking forward to using this as it is so well planned and the visuals are terrific. Thank you!

The Kindness Pledge is basically a refrain in my first grade classroom - known by my students and their parents, too! I hope it helps you in your classroom, too. 

Feel free to reach out with any questions or feedback! You can contact me at lisa@growingfirsties.com any time! I'm teaching full time in the classroom and will get back to you as soon as possible because I love helping teachers!