In our pastoral groups we talk​ about kindness and how kindness helps us build positive relationships or connections with others.

Kindness is about caring for others through helpful and generous acts. It can involve doing favours and good deeds, providing emotional support, or offering our time and skills to others. Being kind helps us build meaningful connections with others.

Humans are born to be kind. In order for humans to have survived as a species, we needed kindness! We needed to learn to cooperate and deal with conflict peacefully in order to build a healthy, well-functioning society. Stephen Post, a researcher and best- selling author, says, “We eat because it keeps us alive, and we help others because it keeps us human.”   Kindness is at the core of our connection to others.

Not only does kindness help us connect with others, research shows that it has positive effects on our wellbeing too. When we help and give to others, we feel happier, more energetic, stronger and calmer, as well as less anxious, depressed and stressed. We are wired to feel good when doing things for others – when we carry out acts of kindness, the pleasure centres of our brain light up. Kindness is its own reward!

We can foster our children’s kindness through modelling kindness ourselves, giving them responsibilities and opportunities to be caring and helpful, and exposing them to kind, inspiring people. This communicates the importance that society places on kindness and helps children recognise how connected we all are.

In our Pastoral groups, we explored what kindness looks like at home and school.

We thought about how our school dispositions would help us to be kind. Some examples we came up with include:

• (Show) Courage – I stand up for others, I am an Upstander, I can ask someone new to play
• Reflect – I think about other’s thoughts and feelings, I make kind choices, If I haven’t made a good choice, I think about how to be kind to make things right
  
• Explore – I notice others around me and treat them with kindness
  
• Collaborate – I work well with others, I include others, I help others, I listen to others ideas
  
• Organise – I make sure I am organised and ready to show kindness to my teachers, parents and classmates.
  

We learnt about kindness boomerangs – where we can spread kindness and eventually kindness may come back to us. There is a great video that explains this topic for adults (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwAYpLVyeFU) for more information. We watched a video of some school children (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OawcNC9Y2es) showing how we can make our own kindness boomerang at school and identified different ways we can be kind to others. Some of our tips for how to share the kindness boomerang around our school community are below and are posted around our school grounds to remind us.

Our challenge at school over the next few weeks is to spread kindness through our school community. We encourage you to ask your child/ren how they may be able to contribute to spreading kindness at school and at home!

Try this at home: With your children, create a list of five ways you can each show kindness to others as a way to spread joy and build your positive connections. You could even make a plan to carry out all five random acts of kindness today!

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