Volunteering Kindness

We've done it, just finished our 15th year of our Knit-for-Service Club meetings. Doesn't this year's group of volunteer needle-workers look adorable?

Third, fourth and fifth graders volunteer their time,

to knit a cap to help save the life of an underweight preemie.

Photo credit: Save The Children

Unravel details about our 15 years of knitting to serve
 {here}, {here} and {here}.

Here's our keepsake Knit One, Save One video; 
these young knitters are now high school seniors about to graduate. 

I'm told a few of them still use their skill to help others.

Volunteering is contagious like that; once you get the ball rolling, you'll want to keep on helping out. Lisa Currie from The Ripple Kindness Project wrote about the helper's high in this kindness post. Volunteering has been shown to help improve the health and well-being of volunteers and donors.

And no, you don't have to have a special skill to be a volunteer;

anyone can see a need and fill a need. Consider these opportunities right in your own neighborhood: washing a car, raking some leaves, shoveling some snow, mowing a lawn, watering some plants.

Need a nudge launching a volunteer campaign of your own? Why not sign up with WE Volunteer Now, an inspired way to organize a student volunteer activity. Whether you want to visit a senior home, donate to a food pantry or raise awareness about a cause that your kids are passionate about—like safe driving or recycling— this campaign is an easy way to get started.

 Simply enter here on WeAreTeachers and you’ll get an instant download from WE Volunteer Now, full of information on how to start a volunteer campaign at your school. You’ll also get access to grade-specific lessons you can use right away. 

WE Volunteer Now Campaign Resources include:

·       A step-by-step guide on how to get started with service learning curriculum in your classroom

·       Volunteering ideas

·       Teacher checklists to keep you on track

·       A worksheet for you to complete with your class—by the end you’ll have a solid idea of which volunteering option is best for you!

·       We Volunteer Now curriculum

Made possible by The Allstate Foundation, the WE Volunteer Now grants help schools and youth groups in their effort to give back to their local communities in a creative and unique way. As a bonus, 500 schools will receive a $250 grant to use towards their volunteer project. The grants will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis to all eligible schools/groups, to be used toward supporting your volunteer project. The eligible school or youth organization must:

·       Have an educator, administrator, or adult group leader to fill out this application 

·       Be based in the U.S. and registered in the WE Schools program

·       Plan to use the provided funds between October 2017 – October 2018

·       Include students/youth participants in grades K-12

·       Participate in the WE Volunteer Now Campaign

Check out the reasons to join WE schools {here}, then enjoy these benefits:

Inspire your students to make a real difference. When you join the WE movement, you’re giving your students a chance to make a difference in their neighborhood and in the world. Together you’ll find something you are passionate about and can work toward as a group.

Fit service into your curriculum with ease. You signed up and took the first step. Now, you can use the WE Schools Kit to figure out which action or campaign your students want to work on throughout the year. The kit is packed with ideas for teachers and students to brainstorm ideas and set goals.

Earn your way to WE Day. Once you’ve decided on a project, finished your good deed, and reported your results, you’ll get a chance to earn your way to WE Day. It’s a stadium-sized event (there are six held annually in select cities across the country!) that brings together amazing speakers and performers. And YOU and YOUR students could be honored; students can tune in and watch live.

Be a part of something huge. Last year, 4,200 schools across the United States signed up and participated in WE Schools. That’s 1.3 million students! Plus, over 3.1 million viewers watched the WE Day Special on CBS this past August.

Help your students earn service learning hours and AP credits. High, middle, and even elementary schools are requiring students to log the time they’ve spent on service learning and volunteering. The WE Schools framework gives your students more options to gain volunteering time in ways integrated with your lessons.

Instill a love of volunteerism in your students (that they’ll have forever) just like we've done with our knitters. In a hectic world that values achievements and grades, it can be tough for students (and their parents) to make the time for giving back. WE Schools and the WE Volunteer Now campaign show us all how accessible volunteering can be.

Sign up for WE {here}.  

NOTE: This post is brought to you by WeAreTeachers, the Allstate Foundation and WE. Please join me in thanking them for their sponsorship.

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Our Empathy Building

Happy Thursday. First, this beautiful collage of gratitude from Germany as a follow-up to our Sweets For Our Soldiers campaign. It makes our hearts happy to see them bathed in our Valentines, support and love.  

Second, this chair.

It just showed up in my office last week. Randomly. Because our handyman Fred noticed that I'd been sitting on a kid-sized chair with no padding and no wheels. The most thoughtful gifts are all about the noticing, aren't they?

Third, please join me in praying for the Parkland community and the Douglas High School family. Their hearts are broken as they try to understand the horrific events that unfolded there yesterday. 

School shootings, says character-education guru and parenting expert Dr. Michele Borba, are preventable. It takes intentional work every single day, 

but it's more than worth it for 

every child that we help, 

every heart that we heal, 

every life that we save.

Enter her newest brainchild, End Peer Cruelty, Build Empathy.

Click here for purchasing information at Amazon.

 This comprehensive guide to elevating empathy and positively transforming your school culture is a must for every caregiver, for every parent, for every grandparent, for every person working with and around children of all ages. Use Dr. Borba's 6Rs Bullying-Prevention Process with proven strategies to nurture, stretch and build social and emotional skills and make caring connections a priority woven into the very fabric of your character building.

Click {here} for a freebie download with 45 ways to build empathy and end bullying that Dr. Borba has generously shared.

Want more info? Click {here} for a Q&A with the author to see for yourself that this is a book you will not want to miss. It has my enthusiastic endorsement.

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The Kindness Olympics

Happy Random Acts of Kindness Week. We've been on such a kindness kick at school this year that it almost feels like we're training for the Kindness Olympics, as if there were such a thing. We kicked off the year by collecting quarters so that our Student Council leaders could buy some fleece to cut and tie these beautiful blankets to help warm up our friends who are struggling with homelessness. We collected enough quarters to buy the fleece for fifty blankets . . . 

and fill Mr. Whitlock's van for distribution in Houston.

We had just finished with the fleece when we received this incredible donation of blankets from our friends at Warm Up, America!, knit, crocheted, and tied as housewarming gifts for those friends who are just now returning home after Hurricane Harvey displaced them six months ago.

What a delight it has been to distribute this generous gift. Even as I was finding homes for these gorgeous throws, we were busy in Art class creating our Kindness Rocks. Just this past week, this one came in from a school in Racine, Wisconsin.

At the end of January, we welcomed the Kids For Peace Kindness Team . . . 

 to build our Peace Garden and dedicate our Peaceful Hearts Playground. We are so grateful to GameTime, Hasbro, Kind Coins contributors, and our PTO for our new state-of-the-art play space.

Our #kindcoins spokesperson, Jet Stream Jax, has gone on location several times these past few weeks to video chat from the playground with schools who donated to help make our dream play space a reality. It's super fun to watch him interact with other kindness crusaders from coast to coast. 

Before we could even start breaking in our new Challenge Course, it was time to launch our annual Sweets for Our Soldiers campaign. We made these colorful, creative Valentines for our troops in Counseling Classes . . . 

and sent out this request for baked goods.

And did our school family ever respond in kind; just look at this table filled with kindness from our kitchens waiting for our student leaders to put together our priority mail packages.

Thirty six of these care packages are heading to the ten deployed servicemen that we adopted at the time of this post.

And for fun, we cut up our PSA posters like this one . . . 

 and put them in the boxes to give the soldiers a puzzle to build.

We are so grateful to the Friendswood Rotary for their

$500 donation to help defray the cost of postage.

You may think that we're done donating for a while, but just this week I saw some adorable PSA posters being hung in our halls, announcing a Pet Supply drive to help our shelters who are still housing Hurricane Harvey rescue animals. 

See what I mean about the Kindness Olympics? Just imagine if the world were as determined, dedicated, and driven to warm our world with kindness as our olympic athletes are to win a medal for their countries.

I'm so thankful to work in a place where we truly are 

in training for the Kindness Olympics all year long.

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Project Cope Empathy Heroes

One of my favorite presentations at this year's Forum was a gregarious group of students from Birmingham Covington School in Michigan whom I've come to revere as my empathy heroes. I cried in their session when they showed this clip that they made as part of their Project Cope service-learning project:

They set their goal at $12K, so they could purchase that tractor to help their friend Victor and his village. They did all sorts of projects, but my favorite was the jewelry they made by repurposing used gift cards ... and I'm not even a jewelry girl.

They had a booth set up and were taking orders

for custom-made pieces. So cool.

I donated my empty Starbucks card for the cause. 

In their breakout, they talked in pairs about what they'd done, how and why. They were unstoppable in pursuit of their goal for this project with a purpose. They worked to find people to partner with; they even got Microsoft to contribute $3,000, which helped them exceed their goal by that much.

Kids as entrepreneurs and philanthropists, because of their elevated empathy for some people and their plight clear across the world. 

I like it.

Want some more information on empathy?

Check out Teaching Empathy in Five Easy Steps {here},

Roots of Empathy {here},

Start Empathy {here}, 

The Empathy Way {here}

and The Empathy Library {here}.

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This Looks Like A Job For ...

I've been thinking a lot about service lately. 

How people serve. 

Why people serve.

The benefits of serving.

This United Way screen shot tells me that

service has the power to unite people.

Check out how these elderly are uniting with students to practice language skills and more using Skype {here} ... very cool!

I know that the topic of service united a group of us on a #servechat Thursday night. Hosted by Sheila over at Pennies of Time, this hour engaged and intrigued me, partly because it was designed with teens in mind. The guest expert, Lisa Van Engen from About Proximity amazed me! Click the graphic to find 100 {yes, you read that right, one hundred} ideas for youth community service.

Those of us who work with elementary-aged students will likely need to start smaller, because they don't drive yet and because many of the service opportunities in the community come with an age-requirement for liability reasons.

What services can your little superheroes perform?  

This looks like a job for: 

Click {here} to purchase this editable superheroes set.

These are just a few of the things that our students do.

And we've found that, just like kindness begets kindness, 

service begets service.

The more kids serve, the more they want to serve.

Turns out that's true for grown-ups, too.

Yesterday when I pulled up to the drive-thru window at McDonald's and handed the cashier my $4.19, I was told that the car in front of me had already paid my bill. A kind act of service to be sure. And I almost drove away as I thanked him kindly. Then it occurred to me, if receiving this gift made me feel so good, what if I followed suit? So I paid for the person behind me and left there with my caramel frappe and sugar cookies just as happy as could be {and not just because I was on a sugar high}! 

Teach your little ones to serve, watch them soar

like the superheroes they're meant to be,

and take note about how it unites your class family. 

Serve others yourself, and feel what happens,

not only to the recipient of your kindness,

but to you.

Then treat yourself to some decadence once in a while ...

because you can't feed if you're not being fed.

What are some fun ways in which you serve?

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Common Care Guest Post

Today I'm excited because I've spent some quality time with a wonderful 

school family in Santa Barbara that's on a kindness crusade. 

Their campus has an ocean-front view!

We had so much fun singing, dancing, laughing, and connecting

that I think I could see the palm trees moving with us.

 I woke up with a migraine, so the first hour wasn't my finest, but once the water that I drank to combat my dehydration kicked in, I was good to go.

I made this graphic to share with them:

It truly was a terrific time.

While I've been away, I collaborated on a guest post called

Making Caring Commonplace at the Character Educator.

Sheila from Pennies of Time was kind enough to do a Q & A with me after we reviewed some research that caught our attention!

It makes me wonder: What if we were teaching 

Common Care instead of Common Core?

Because after all, what kind of a world do we want?

Thanks, Sheila, for your wise words and action plan.

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Service Above Self

Meet Anna. I knew her before she was born, because her mom, LeAnn, works with me at Westwood-Bales. Anna, a soon-to-be second grader, came to the book launch in her blinged-out superkid shirt, which, by the way, suits her to a T, and with that beautiful card she made for me. What I want you to pay special attention to is their matching hair styles.

Ever since LeAnn came to work at our school ten years ago, she's had long hair. Not super long, but let's say ten inches longer than her now-shoulder-length do. It's just been her look, how we know her. So I was surprised to see her the other day with a bobbed-off cut. When I stopped her to compliment her beautiful new style, 

she told me how it happened.

You see, we have this Ponytail Club at school, and her little angel, Anna, wanted to donate her hair in this year's event. It was a goal she set for herself at the end of Kindergarten, after last year's event, when her locks weren't quite long enough. All throughout the year, her mom tells me, Anna kept encouraging her to follow suit, 

to cut and donate her hair, too.

Well who can refuse that sweet smile and special invitation? So, encouraged and urged on by her daughter's compassion and love, LeAnn cut her hair and this mother-daughter duo shared their locks with love. 

Isn't that just the best, when a child is at the root of such generosity?

Service Above Self, the essence of the Rotary International all around the world. I had the pleasure of being invited to a meeting with the Friendswood Rotary yesterday and left there thinking that I want to be a Rotarian when I grow up. Have you ever been to one of their meetings? Such camaraderie and brotherhood ... with lots of sisters thrown in for good measure, of course! Like Anna and her mom, they're superheroes crusading for good. That's why I'm especially touched and honored that they would choose me for their 2014 Vocational Service Award.

 Just as I finished up my 30th year and launched into a summer of savoring, I was presented with this beautiful plaque and a monetary gift that helped me purchase an iPad to travel with me on my book tour. My first device {shocking, I know!} and a distinction that I will treasure for a lifetime from an organization whose members walk the talk by putting character into action, every day.

As I start to savor my summer, I'm certainly walking on sunshine ... 

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