10 Ideas to Spark Compassionate Kids with a Kindness Bulletin Board
Being kind is a super important thing to teach our students no matter what age they are. There don’t seem to be enough kind people in our world anymore and we need to restock. While there are many ways to teach kindness in your classroom, I think the best place to start is with a kindness bulletin board. I know there are many different ideas out there to promote kindness through a bulletin board in your classroom, but here are 10 of my favorite.
1. Be a bucket filler.
Read How Full is Your Bucket for Kids by Tom Rath to your students. Create an accompanying bulletin board for your class to illustrate how to fill buckets instead of draining buckets. Compliments and kind words can go a long way to make everyone’s day a better one. Your bulletin board can be similar to the one displayed at Perry Meridian Sixth Grade Academy. They simply cut out a giant bucket and drops of water to surround it. Each student is given a chance to write something that would encourage a friend.
2. Color the world with kindness.
By using a fun crayon theme, you can help encourage your students to be kind with a kindness bulletin board. Colorful crayons can help illustrate the kindness we can spread throughout the world. In a fun printable you can download, I have a resource perfect for this kindness bulletin board. The bulletin board kindness kit includes a pdf file that you can print in any size you want, pictures, individual letters to print out the words Color the World with Kindness, and blank banners to display more kindness throughout your room.
3. The kindness tree.
Another great bulletin board idea comes from Teacher Blog Spot. This kindness bulletin board is pretty easy to assemble. All you need to begin this display is a tree trunk, you can easily fit the area you have available in your classroom. Once the tree trunk is ready, your students do the rest. Brainstorm with students kind ways to act and what they can do in the classroom to be kind to others and themselves. When students are kind, they get to write their name and their act of kindness on a leaf and attach it to the tree. This is especially fun if you can keep the tree up all year and see how full your kindness tree is before summer.
4. Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.
Encourage your students to be kind with a fun rainbow kindness bulletin board. This statement of encouragement can be a simple banner across the room, on the back of the door, or it can be a fun bulletin board. If you want to get students involved in the creation, create paper chains of colors to make the kindness bulletin board rainbow three-dimensional. On each paper in the chain ask students to write some way that they can be kind.
5. Display kindness posters.
If you are short on space and don’t have an entire bulletin board in your classroom to use for a kindness bulletin board display, have no fear. I have a great idea for space saver posters for your classroom. I have created three resources perfect for small spaces. The three posters are: Throw Kindness Around Like Confetti, Be Somebody Who Makes Everybody Feel Like a Somebody, and Today is Full of Possible. Whenever your students see these posted around the room, they will feel encouraged and ready to be kind for the rest of the day. Each one of these posters also includes an activity for your students to work together to decorate the poster.
6. Random acts of kindness.
Random acts of kindness are not new, it’s a concept many of us have grown up with. However, it is a concept that fewer and fewer people are participating in anymore. Encourage your students to practice random acts of kindness at home and at school with a kindness bulletin board promoting different ideas. Check out the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation for challenges to help make kindness the norm.
7. Be the “I” in KIND.
This is a great kindness bulletin board to have displayed at the beginning of the school year. Use really big cut-out letters of a K, N, and D with a space in the middle where the I should be in the word KIND. Take pictures at back-to-school night or during the first weeks of school of your students taking turns physically replacing the letter I in the bulletin board. Post those pictures all around the bulletin board and your classroom to encourage your students to be the letter “I” in KIND!
8. Do the kindness challenge.
The Kindness Challenge: 25 Days of Kindness includes 25 days of kindness for your students to participate and compete in. It is a resource perfect for every grade of school. There are daily challenges for each student to spread kindness through every aspect of their lives at school and at home. I like to display the calendar on my kindness bulletin board with the tasks for each day and encourage students to write down what they did to fill up the bulletin board with kindness.
