Potter students celebrate kindness with field trips, craft projects

Jan 30, 2018

Although kindness is always front and center at Potter Elementary School, students took an extra week to spread an even more positive messages than usual.

From January 23-26, students participated in a variety of special themed days centered around a message of spreading kindness to others.

It was all part of the Great Kindness Challenge, a national movement dedicated to celebrating inclusion and positive behavior for a week in schools across the country.

Throughout the week, students had themed dress-up days and in-class activities centered around kindness, explained school social worker Carrie Gregoire.

Students created a “blizzard of kindness” with their photos and kind traits, dressed up in workout clothes to “work for kindness,” and each class decorated a hallway with inspiring decorations.

“The theme is kindness and how we feel when people are kind to us and we’re kind to others,” Gregoire said.

Potter’s fifth grade classes took on the leadership of the initiative to tie into the class’s reading of the book Wonder. The book, which tells the tale of a boy who builds a mask to wear to hide the appearance of his face.

The book was just turned into a film, and to celebrate, fifth graders took a field trip to see a special screening of the film and built masks in class to share with their peers.