The Golden Rule

In September, as I am co-creating the classroom environment with my students and establishing our classroom principals I always share with them "the golden rule" I learned as a child: treat others the way you want to be treated.  We discuss what that means as a class, and more importantly, what does that look like in our learning environment.  Students share their thoughts and ideas and together we create a concept chart that includes student generated examples of the golden rule.  At it's core the golden rule stresses the importance of being kind and caring and the students recognize that.  We discuss the importance of being kind and caring people and how that impacts not only us in our classroom but how it impacts the world we live in.

A wonderful picture book that illustrates the concept beautifully is A Circle of Friends by Giora Carmi.  The book is wordless but it's illustrations convey the story clearly and can be appreciated by all elementary students.  In the story a little boy's act of kindness inspires a cycle of kind acts that inevitable comes back to the boy.

I also make a point of sharing this video called the kindness boomerang.  This video was introduced to me by a colleague who uses this video to inspire her students to perform random acts of kindness.  A follow-up activity you can have your students do is challenge them to perform a random act of kindness for somebody and have them share (in whatever medium they prefer) how that random act impacted them and the person they were kind to.  The video link is below, enjoy!: