Kindness Ninjas Changing the World With Kindness Again

In the late Fall, our class was invited to become Kindness Ninjas! Every year, the Kindness ninjas live out their mission of changing the world one Random Act of Kindness at a time! 

We started out by brainstorming kind words that would make others feel special and encouraged! Then we wrote out messages for kids in other classes!



Kindness Ninjas were turning up all over our room!





We snuck the baskets outside their doors! After each act of kindness, we talked about how their acts of kindness can make it spread further! We found out another class filled the basket with kindness notes and gave it to another class! 



We gave another class Christmas Cards with kind words for them and candy kisses!



I can’t remember how homelessness came up, but the kids were very concerned for those without homes! We got blankets donated to us from a parent who was able to get them from “Blankets of Hope!”



We rolled them up.



Then added an encouraging note to each one.

I dropped them off here at St. Vincent de Paul to pass out to those who need them.



A few weeks later we found out that during a major freeze, St. Vincent’s was sheltering over 600 people each night. We decided to collect some things they may need as they are taking shelter. We also decided to ask the other classes in our school for help.

Each one of the Kindness Ninjas wrote a letter to a teacher asking them and their class for help! We next made posters and collection boxes to put around the school! Talk about an authentic use of their emerging writing skills! 









We checked the boxes and brought everything we found up to our room to put with our own item!





We decided to organize them and put them in groups of ten to figure out how many of each we had. Because of boxes with multiples, they had to work hard to make some groups of ten by adding groups together!







We recorded what we had collected the first week.















After a second week, we were amazed at the amount of items we had collected and organized! Everyone really wanted to help! In the end, we donated around 320 wash clothes, 350 tubes of toothpaste, 300+ toothbrushes, almost 500 bars of soap, 23 more blankets, plus some deodorant, bath towels, chapsticks and lots of socks! I think maybe there are a lot more kindness ninjas in our school than we thought! I cannot wait to see what these sweet kids with their big hearts will do next to change the world with kindness!

The Tree Project

In the early Fall, we noticed that the kids were very interested in trees so we took them out to observe one as scientists and see what they notice.

They took this work very seriously and looked closely, but we noticed they were more focused on something other than the attributes of the tree!



They were noticing the evidence of things that lived in the tree! Nests, cicada shells, webs, daddy long legs, were added to their observations of leaves, bark, color and texture.

They learned about the leaves and how they change in the Fall and fall off of the trees. We looked closely at them and noticed details such as the colors, stems and veins. As Christmas was getting closer we asked them about Christmas trees. How were they different? They were so interested in this we held off on our Animals in Trees Investigation to investigate evergreens!

We watched videos about evergreens and learned as much as we could about them!

We decided to show what we noticed by creating both kinds of trees…an evergreen and a deciduous tree!

We made a list of all the different parts of the tree we needed to show. They used their math skills to stack boxes by size starting from largest to smallest. They looked closely at pictures and decided on three different shades of green. We added some branches with pine needles, some pine cones, and some roots, then labeled all the parts.

They also showed what they noticed through art!







We explored some different types of evergreens and recorded what we noticed as scientists.



We learned that pine cones will close up to hold their seeds in when wet so we decided to test this and find out for ourselves. They did! After they dried out they opened up again!

Next we created our deciduous tree. They had to problem solve how to get the tubes to stack because the thinner tubes just fell inside the wider tubes. They decided to stuff the bottom tube with paper so the next tube could rest on that inside! We added branches, bark and roots. Since it was winter we only added a couple dead oak leaves we found on the playground.

Of coarse with Christmas coming we had to make ornaments to decorate our evergreen!

Here are our finished trees!

Now we could start getting into animals that lived in or used the trees in some ways! I set up some areas for them to explore. One which I don’t have a picture of had them dividing animals into categories of “Animals That Live in Ohio” and “Animals That Do Not Live in Ohio.” They did very well! The moose and the bear caused some debate. We also looked at the animals footprints in the snow!

Here are a couple others they played with!

Squirrels and Owls were a big interest so we dived a bit deeper into those two animals. Squirrels use trees for both homes and food! 





They learned that squirrels homes were called Dreys so they created one for our little squirrel friend so that he could live in it in our tree!







We learned about owls and how they use trees for for homes, food and to hide so that their prey won’t see them!



They made some mama owls and baby owls like the ones in the book “Owl Babies” to also live in our tree.



Miss Abby created a display with them to show off our owls and what we learned about them!

We also studied about animals that hibernate, migrate and adapt in the Winter. We read a couple books that talked about helping feed animals that stick around in the winter since it is so much harder for them to find food! We made some animal feeders and took them home to help the animals in our neighborhood!



One family caught a squirrel on camera enjoying their feeder! In a video you can see it grab what was left and run off with it!



We will be taking a little break from our trees and animal studies as we follow a couple other interests and celebrate Valentines Day and 100 Day, but I can guarantee we are not done with these trees and the animals that use them!

Here are a few photos to show what else went on at the same time as this study! Holidays, the Gingerbread Man and Fairy Tales!

Holiday Traditions! 

Our Gingerbread Man ran away!



We made posters!



We used persuasive writing!



We planned and made traps!



And we caught him!



We created spice mix recipes and crushed them! They smaller amazing!







We read and retold many fairy tales and each friend wrote a book that was their own original version of The Three Pigs!

So many things have been going on the past couple months! I can’t wait to see where these kids take us next!