Morris County educators Amanda Miranda and Susan Ort from Washington Township Schools, were awarded a $5,720 grant to carry out a project at Benedict A. Cucinella School and Old Farmers Road School in Long Valley.
Sharing Kindness is a service project for 100 students in grades Pre-K to Grade 5 in two buildings within one school district. It will provide opportunities to develop awareness and the effects of kindness within the community and empower our students with responsibility, engage their compassion, and offer them the chance to affect the lives of others.
Students will create kindness videos to display acts of kindness and create kindness bracelets. Students will work on their communication and fine motor skills while working on a project together for their community.
Students will work together to identify examples of acts of kindness and use their communication skills to create videos that demonstrate acts of kindness. These videos will be viewed in all classrooms monthly to provide examples of what kindness looks like and how to be kind to one another. Students will design and create kindness bracelets to distribute to peers when acts of kindness are displayed. All students will also be involved in creating kindness posters that will be displayed throughout the school and community as a reminder to be kind.
Service learning projects can be life changing for students. Through the combination of videos and activities, our students will have the opportunity to connect and find common ground with others that come from very different backgrounds through meaningful actions.
To end the year of kindness, we will hold a Kindness Fair for students to share their “Caught You Being Kind” presentation that displays videos, pictures and examples of artwork from the past year. Sharing kindness can grow from year to year and throughout the entire community by instilling values and paying it forward. Kindness will surely bloom from this project.
For more information, contact:
Amanda Miranda, Project Coordinator
(908) 797-3488 (home)