Kindness Awards for January 2016

Gem Prep Charter School: Brady, Abigail, and Faithlynn

Community Kindness Award: Cade Sutton, Kindness Video Filmmaker

ANNOUNCEMENTS

We want to help make your monthly Kindness Day a successful one! Not only for all our local schools, but also for the businesses that are out in our community joining our Kindness Movement efforts and wearing the Kindness t-shirts with our students. This being our first year, we are constantly coming up with new ideas to better the CKM Program. If you have feedback that you would like to share, please send it our way. We have been in touch with the Pocatello/Chubbuck School District #25 about getting feedback from all their School Principals. We encourage other Principals outside of the District to also give us their feedback. We would like to hear about how and if the CKM Program is helping make a difference in your schools and most importantly, helping with Bullying Prevention efforts. In time, CKM will only get better. Thank you for you support and patience.

We are happy to announce that we have added New CKM Team Members and still looking for others that want to help! If your school has a parent that would be interested in joining us as your school’s representative, we would highly recommend it. They can contact us through our website or on FB page. We also want to encourage students to join our CKM leadership positions as well. Wilcox Middle School has a student-formed PTA that attended the PTA Legislature Day with us. I ate lunch with a few of those students and they mentioned how their school has been celebrating the monthly Kindness Days. I loved hearing that. Thank you, Wilcox Middle School for implementing the CKM Program, regardless of the funding for the Kindness T-shirts. We have considered starting an application process for next year. We feel this might be the best way to determine which schools would like to continue or implement the CKM Program for next year and to give us a better idea of  how much funding we would need to raise. If we plan on doing this, we will make the announcement very soon!

We hope this monthly Kindness Day Newsletter will provide you with more information to make your Kindness Day a successful one. Below we are providing you with suggested planning tools and a reminder of the Kindness Day Theme. We welcome you to customize the theme to fit your school. You can forward this email onto your Kindness Ambassador(s) that are helping implement Kindness Day.  The Kindness Day Theme Calendar is available on our website HERE. Encourage your students to wear their Yellow Kindness T-shirts this Thursday and if your students don’t have Kindness T-shirts, invite them to wear the color Yellow and Red!

I will be surprising a very deserving student from Indian Hills Elementary with the Student Kindness Award. She was nominated by her grandmother. Remember that anyone can fill out a Kindness Award Nomination Form on our website. We grant a Kindness Award to (1) Student and (1) Individual in our Community each month. Thank you, and may everyone have a wonderful Kindness Day!

February 18th 2016 Theme – “Kindness Heart Attack”

February is the perfect month to celebrate LOVE and KINDNESS.

5-10 min. KINDNESS DAY LESSON:

By Performing Kindness, it builds a Healthier Heart!

Acts of kindness are often accompanied by emotional warmth. Emotional warmth produces the hormone oxytocin in the brain and throughout the body. Of much recent interest is its significant role in the cardiovascular system.

Oxytocin causes the release of a chemical called nitric oxide in blood vessels, which dilates (expands) the blood vessels. This reduces blood pressure, and therefore, oxytocin is known as a “cardioprotective” hormone because it protects the heart (by lowering blood pressure). The key is that acts kindness can produce oxytocin, and therefore, kindness can be said to be cardioprotective.

How can kindness improve your health?

Volunteering results in more health benefits than exercising or quitting smoking. “Helping a neighbor, volunteering, or donating goods and services results in a helper’s high.” —Stephen Post, Author,“The Hidden Gifts of Helping”.

It’s a classic tale, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge — the epitome of selfishness, the quintessential mean-spirited, miserly, narcissistic old man. Yet as Scrooge discovers the joy of good deeds, he blooms with the “helper’s high” – and his spirit is reborn. And a merrier man had never been seen, as the story goes.

In the last few years, researchers have looked at the so-called helper’s high and its effects on the human body. Scientists are searching to understand just how altruism — the wish to perform good deeds — affects our health, even our longevity.

Acts of heroism are one form of altruism — as we saw on 9/11, when firemen rushed into the World Trade Center. Many firemen, chaplains, and citizens joined the rescue and recovery effort, working grueling 12-hour shifts.

In everyday life, countless people choose to give up free time to volunteer — whether it’s serving at soup kitchens, cleaning up litter, taking elderly people to the grocery store, or helping a next-door neighbor.

What prompts a human being to act heroically? What makes us perform good deeds? When we act on behalf of other people, research shows that they feel greater comfort, less stress. But what about the do-gooder’s physiology — how is it affected? Can doing good make us healthier, as a growing number of scientists now believe? Can it even, as studies suggest, help us live longer?

Surprisingly, they found that numbers of children, education, class, and work status did not affect longevity. After following these women for 30 years, researchers found that 52% of those who did not volunteer had experienced a major illness — compared with 36% who did volunteer.

Two large studies found that older adults who volunteered reaped benefits in their health and well-being. Those who volunteered were living longer than non-volunteers. Another large study found a 44% reduction in early death among those who volunteered a lot — a greater effect than exercising four times a week — Christine Carter, Author“ Raising Happiness; In Pursuit of Joyful Kids and Happier Parents”.

Ideas for “Heart Attack” Theme:

1. Use Yellow and Red paper to cut our your hearts to resemble Kindness and Love.
2. Have your students write down how Kindness makes their hearts feel when they perform it or receive it. Then have your class heart attack your classroom door for display.
3. Have your class “Heart Attack” another teacher’s class door with kind messages written on the hearts.
4. Have each of your student assigned another classmate in their class. Have them write a heartfelt message to give to that other student and let them wear it on their Kindness T-shirts that day for all to see.
5. Have your students draw pictures of themselves performing kindness or have them write how kindness makes them feel. Then take the hearts and tape them down in your hallway forming a path. Have a poster or bulletin board pre-made saying “We are building a path of Love and Kindness“. After Kindness Day you can take the hearts and display them on the bulletin board or around the poster to have on display for the rest of the month of February.
6. In the secondary schools, put the hearts on the students lockers with premade message (you’re awesome, smartie, hugs) and challenge them to stick their hearts onto another person’s locker by the end of the day anonymously.