This week Crestview celebrated its third year participating in The Great Kindness Challenge. A week-long program, designed by the non-profit Kids for Peace, this event began as a small local movement involving 3 schools and a few hundred children 14 years ago. It has since grown to include 20 million children across 41,000 schools worldwide.
At Crestview, kind acts abounded! This year’s celebration was spearheaded by the Crestview Student Council and the 4th-grade service-learning classes. Crestview Student Council members kicked off the week with a fun and informative morning assembly to get the entire school excited about performing acts of kindness and explaining the purpose and importance of The Great Kindness Challenge. Each day all week-long acts of kindness were celebrated in a myriad of ways. Teachers were given Classroom Kindness kits filled with resources and ideas for kindness activities in the classroom. Students and teachers alike helped create a kindness mural where acts of kindness received or witnessed were recorded on hearts and pasted to the poster in a moving visual of the many simple acts of kindness that are performed on campus every day. Students participated in themed dress-up days like Positivi-tee Tuesday where they wore t-shirts with positive and friendly messages. Each grade level organized and ran a Kindness Station where students could participate in crafts and activities with a kindness theme. The week ended with a rousing closing assembly where we celebrated the many acts of kindness performed throughout the week proving that here at Crestview Kindness Matters!
The Great Kindness Challenge highlights the incredible potential of collective kindness to create positive change. Kids for Peace asserts, “At the heart of the Great Kindness Challenge is the simple belief that kindness is strength. We also believe that any action that’s repeated over and over becomes a habit. With the Great Kindness Challenge checklist, students can repeat kind act after kind act. As kindness becomes a habit, the culture shifts, and peace becomes possible. This is a grassroots movement to make our schools, communities, and world a kinder and more compassionate place for all.”