Throughout the year, I continue to have activities that promote respect, kindness, and empathy. Here are two examples:
Kindness Bricks
I have short forms printed on colored paper for the students to take each time they witness an act of kindness. Part of the form goes to the person who did the kind act, and the other part gets put on our kindness wall. The students would often proudly display their slips at their seats, as well as look at how our wall grows.
Compliment Flowers
I would randomly assign each student another student in the room. They would then make a flower for that person and each petal listed a good trait of that person. Besides being good for building positive classroom culture, it gives practice in character traits as well. The flowers were then displayed on our “Compliment-tree.”