Grades
3 - 8
How to Encourage Upper Elementary and Middle School Students to Engage in Acts of Kindness
With these inspiring books and writing activities, you’ll create a caring classroom filled with kind and compassionate students.
How to Encourage Upper Elementary and Middle School Students to Engage in Acts of Kindness
When you encourage acts of kindness in your upper elementary or middle school classroom, your students will realize just how important compassion, empathy, and gratitude really are and the profound effects kindness can have on the world. They’ll not only treat their classmates with respect, but they’ll also jump at the chance to help each other out!
These three books and writing activities are a great way to motivate your students to be even more kind to one another, inspiring them to practice at home and in their community what they've learned in your caring classroom.
You can find all books and activities at The Teacher Store.
This story of friendship and helping others will inspire the kindness, compassion, and gratitude you want to see from your students. When your students open this book, they’ll travel to a hardscrabble town in Ohio, where they’ll meet three friends who know the true secret of a well that suddenly begins granting wishes.
After reading, encourage your students to reflect on the story and the feeling that it evokes with these writing prompts:
Your students will relate to this story of kindness and compassion and the struggle its main character Benny Barrows must endure as a fourth grader with bad luck. After reading, invite students to reflect on the concept of luck by sharing your own stories of bad luck and good fortune. Next, instruct students to dive a little deeper with these writing prompts:
In Front Desk, your students will meet Mia Tang, a young student with big dreams of becoming a writer who lives in a motel and works its front desk. But that’s not her only secret: Her parents help immigrants by hiding them in the motel’s empty rooms. While Mia takes on more than the average student, this book is a wonderful story of courage and kindness that will inspire your students help others.
After reading, invite your students to reflect on their own secrets and dreams with these writing prompts:
Fiesty and resilient Mia Tang works and lives at the motel with her parents, who secretly help immigrants, while she pursues her dream of being a writer.
As three monks travel along a mountain road, they encounter villagers ravaged by harsh times, making them cold to strangers. When the monks entice them to make soup from stones, the villagers discover how much they have to give.
Wilbur is the runt of a litter born to a pig on the farm of Fern Arable's father. When it is announced that her father is going to kill the pig, Fern rushes forth to save it.
Joe and Ravi don't think they have anything in common, but soon enough they have a common enemy (the biggest bully in their class) and a common mission: to take control of their lives over the course of a single crazy week.
The squirrel never saw the vacuum cleaner coming, but self-described cynic Flora Belle Buckman is just the right person to step in and save him. What neither can predict is that Ulysses (the squirrel) has been born anew, with powers of strength, flight, and misspelled poetry, and that Flora will be changed too, as she discovers the possibility of hope and the promise of a capacious heart.
Inspired by kindness projects and anti-bullying campaigns across the country, the first book of this delightful series will have readers thinking about what it means to be kind.
A brilliant, emotionally charged novel about two boys. One is a slow learner, too large for his age, and the other is a tiny, disabled genius. The two pair up to create one formidable human force known as "Freak the Mighty."
Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys' detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the warden makes the boys "build character" by spending all day, every day, digging holes five feet wide and five feet deep. It doesn't take long for Stanley to realize there's more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake: the warden is looking for something. Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime, punishment, and redemption.
