Kindness in Kindergarten

This month we are wrapping up our Kindness Project and it has been an amazing learning journey. We have had many, many discussions about kindness and throughout it all the children continued to be enthusiastic and demonstrate expanding understandings and skills. The adults who work with our class; parents, EA, guest teachers and community volunteers have commented that they see a collaborative, caring sense of community embedded in our classroom program. If you have been following the project, the last activity that we did was collect quotes from the children which complimented our understandings of kindness. 
This week as we wrapped up our project, the children sorted their thinking (collected on sticky notes) into categories. As they sorted we needed to add more categories such as courtesy and gentleness.
We have learned the importance of listening to each other and trying to understand why someone is mean. This has probably had the biggest impact on our classroom community as I observe the peer to peer conversations beginning to show children trying to figure out why a peer was mean. 
We have been intentional in our kindness by sharing with other classes, decorating the hallways with beautiful art and hanging hearts in our school foyer. The children baked cookies for two classrooms and then when they delivered the cookies they explained (without an adult) what we were learning. 
Our final act was to sort some of the hearts on our heart tree and match them to their new vocabulary.
This was the longest project that I have done with Kindergarten. We began in October, stopped in mid March while I was away in Italy for three weeks and then resumed in mid April. It happened alongside all of the other wonderful Kindergarten learning that has been going on but the children never lost interest and the conversations continued to be more sophisticated.