At Commack Road and Sherwood elementary schools, Kindness Week brought students and staff together to enhance social-emotional learning and school unity.
At Sherwood, students dressed for each day of the week, wearing Islip gear to show pride, yellow to spread kindness, tie-dye to show peace and love, and purple to promote acceptance on P.S. I Love You Day. To celebrate kindness to animals, students brought in photos of their pets and shared them on the school’s main bulletin board. Sherwood students also engaged in various kindness-oriented activities in classrooms and the library. For example, third graders in Ingrid Mileski’s class began Kindness Week with each student celebrating “Why I Love Myself.” Her students also participated in a “Compli-mat” activity in which the class shared compliments about one another and wrote why each classmate was appreciated.
“The Kindness Week building activities made everyone feel appreciated,” Mileski said.
At Commack Road, an entire Kindness Month in January culminated in a Kindness Spirit Week.
Commack Road’s Spirit Week activities began with a Monday in pajamas, and also included a friendship bulletin board with heart-shaped words and a “Kind & Seek” challenge encouraging students to seek acts of kindness. Teachers Jill Bohnaker, Cheryl Brown, Sara Comiskey and Shannon Dignam created a Great Kindness Challenge poster contest and bulletin board. Snowballs on the board recognized acts of kindness that students caught their classmates doing over the prior month. The week ended with students and staff wearing purple for P.S. I Love You Day and its “Together We Will Rise” theme, led by the fourth-grade class of teachers Meghan Flynn and Christine LeMaire.
“We completed acts of kindness throughout the month of January as a schoolwide kindness initiative,” Commack Road Principal James Cameron said. “It was wonderful to watch the students come together to spread kindness and define success at CRES.”
“Even though the week ended, our class continues to encourage everyone to show kindness and compassion always,” LeMaire said.
As a result of these many kindness activities, Islip was recognized as a Kindness Certified School District by Great Kindness Challenge organizers Kids for Peace.