Secret Acts Of Kindness PBL
The Secret Service Acts of Kindness PBL is a super fun and super rewarding kindness project. As a 3rd grade teacher, one of my very favorite projects that I have ever had my students participate in was the Secret Service Acts Of Kindness PBL. My students became real secret service agents. They were given a seven-day kindness challenge in a top-secret envelope that only they were allowed to see.
Ssshhhhh, It’s A Secret!
The students couldn’t share it with anyone, not even their parents! They had to come up with one kind act that they could perform secretly for anyone of their choice either at school or home for each day of the challenge. With Valentine’s Day coming up and Kindness week of 2020, I thought this would be a perfect time to share this amazing kindness project. Many of our schools around us are choosing to forego Valentine’s Day parties this year and are replacing them with kindness parties. Our school is choosing to participate in both:) Click here to download my full Secret Service Agents Of Kindness PBL.
The Secret Service Acts Of Kindness PBL was initially designed to get students to show more kindness to others both in and out of the classroom. My goal was to build intrinsic motivation within my students to show others kindness. To my surprise, the students took off with their top-secret mission and begged me for more. They came up with the idea of extending this to classroom kindness secret agents where we would secretly show kindness to other classrooms. In thinking how we could extend this even further to make this a true PBL, I created the community kindness portion where we would secretly show our community members who do a great job daily to help keep our community safe and clean but probably never get thanked for it.
Kindness Can Happen Anywhere
The Secret Service Acts Of Kindness could take place anywhere, at school, home or out in the community. We choose to complete this project in all three places. The trick was that the students were undercover and couldn’t get “caught” in the act. They had to perform all acts of kindness in secret. The purpose of this was to teach them that they should do good things for others without expecting anything in return. Not a smile, money, gift, points of any sort or even positive praise. They should do kind acts because they are the right things to do, even if nobody notices them. Integrity is a great vocab word to teach with this thought.
The Goal:
My goal with the secret acts of kindness project was to build a positive classroom culture with students who care about others. Not that my students didn’t care about each other or had a hard time showing kindness, they did. My students were all great kids, I just wanted to amplify it. Kick kindness up a notch and make it contagious! The Secret Service Acts of Kindness project not only improved my classroom climate and culture but the entire school climate and culture.
Hello Motivation!!!!
This project taught my kids the value of intrinsic motivation and was a big hit with my 8-year-olds! And boy were they motivated!!!!! In fact, the one week challenge turned into a full school year challenge! They had so much fun with it that they begged me to keep it going the entire school year!!!! As a teacher, this was a really proud moment! In fact, I am now an instructional coach and still have kids that participated in this challenge (that are now in high school) come up to me and bring up the Secret Service project to tell me how fun it was.
Kindness Is Good For Our Health
Although it can feel like children often behave in selfish and self-centred ways, they are not. In contrast, children are actually hardwired to be kind. But, more than that, our brains and bodies have in-built mechanisms to encourage us to be kind. When we are kind to others our brain’s reward centers light up as our bodies release the happy hormone dopamine. This is why people often report experiencing a ‘helper’s high’ after volunteering. According to research, being kind not only feels good but can also be good for our health too. When our minds are happy our bodies release what some experts call the cuddle hormone or oxytocin. This hormone is known to lower blood pressure and protect our hearts.
Small Acts Go A Long Way!
I wanted students to know how their small kind gestures can impact others in a positive way. That kindness is contagious and one kind act can inspire other kind acts. A pay it forward, chain effect of good deeds. I also wanted students to intentionally show kindness to each other so that it would eventually become automatic. To show them that even the smallest act can go a long way for someone. Small acts of kindness can turn someone’s day around or even make someone’s day better. I came up with a Tag, You’re It! pay it forward tag that we would leave when we completed a kind act for another classroom and in the community. This would hopefully inspire others to continue the kind acts for others.
Secret Service Project
Hype It Up!
A good intro is always a must when starting a new project that you want the kids to take off with. Getting the students excited about becoming secret service agents was SUPER easy! I mean, what kid doesn’t like to sneak around? I’ve never met one that doesn’t. Trust me, this was super fun for all of the adults involved too! The students freaked out (in a good way) with the thought of doing secret acts of kindness without their parents knowing.
This was a great teachable moment with when to keep secrets and when to alert someone for safety reasons. With most things in life, students should not keep secrets from their parents, this was just one little exception. To hype the intro up further, I like to play SPY music so that the students really get the feeling of being undercover. Click here for some good Spy music.
As students came in the classroom they found large manilla envelopes on their desk containing their 7-day challenge, reflection forms, Secret Agent badges in staff type badge holders and kindness bingo. This envelope served as the project folder that students used throughout the entire project.
Mark each envelope with student names and one of the following detective titles:
- Detective
- Gumshoe
- Investigator
- Operative
- Constable
- Private Eye
- Sleuth
- Sherlock
I like to make student’s names rhyme with their detective title, but some names are difficult so I rhyme as many as I can then just fill the rest in with titles that haven’t been used yet. Instead of writing on 25 different envelopes, I created envelope tags that can be glued on the outside of each. This made things a lot simpler. Just remember to write the names in red first before glueing.
Define Kindness:
I started this project by defining what kindness is, what it looks like and how it makes people feel when someone is kind to them. I created 7 vocabulary posters which include respect, caring, inclusiveness, courage, responsibility, integrity and community service. The students easily came up with many different ways people have shown them kindness. This can be done in a partner, small group or large group scenario. I would just suggest that in the end you come together as a large group and add all ideas onto one poster to serve as a reminder of kindness. I like to add kindness ideas to the poster throughout the project, which is a great resource for students to pull inspiration from.
Incorporate Writing
This was also a great opportunity to incorporate narrative writing. I had the students write about a time when someone showed them kindness or when they showed someone kindness. We then shared the stories whole class and added ideas to our kindness poster.
In addition to defining kindness, I also taught my students about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. It may sound like it would be a bit above the heads of 8-year-olds, but it wasn’t. They really understood and grasped on to the idea! This project requires intrinsic motivation or the good feelings we get by doing good things, the right things and trying our best.
Brainstorm
I started out by defining Random Acts of Kindness. We then brainstormed a list of ways we could show kindness to others both in school and at home. My students came up with tons of ideas of simple things that could show kindness. I made a T-chart that we recorded our ideas on. One side was what we could do at school and the other side was ideas that students could do at home. The students worked with their small groups first and came up with random acts of kindness for each. We then came together as a large group and added it to our classroom poster.
Random Acts Of Kindness
Home Kindness Agents
On the home side of the T-chart, the students came up with things like:
Since every child’s home life is different, before brainstorming a list of secret acts of kindness as a class that students could complete at home, I had them brainstorm ideas on their own that would fit their specific situation. We then added their ideas to a group list to give others ideas. The challenge was set up so that each student needed to plan 7 ideas they could secretly complete for each day of the challenge. This was the start of their TOP SECRET MISSION. Once each student had a plan ready to go it was up to them to follow through.
Daily Reflections:
As a teacher/coach I really don’t like to do random projects without connecting them to our state standards. The secret service project lent itself really well to incorporating narrative writing. Each day during our work on writing Daily 5 round the students had to fill out a challenge reflection which summarized their R.A.K. completed the previous day. One prompt that I used was; Describe a time when someone was kind to you. Reflection is a huge part of growing as an individual and helps build intrinsic motivation. Remember, that’s what we are aiming for.
Every day I had my students write about their experiences in implementing this project. They had to reflect on the secret service kindness act they performed. This included describing what they did, who for, how that person reacted and how it made them personally feel. I also had my students share their stories with their classmates, partners, groups and whole class. This really helped other students with gathering more ideas than they could possibly implement.
Classroom Kindness Agents
With this project, kindness starts in the classroom. My students came up with the following secret kindness ideas that we could complete as a class at school.
Growth Mindset Jar
The students came up with the idea of starting a compliment jar, which turned into a growth mindset type jar that students would pick out of to start their day off with. I found inspiration for the Growth Mindset jar from one of my favorite blogs, Clutter Free Classroom. This blog is seriously AMAZING!!!!
This was really easy to set up. I literally just found an old glass jar that was lying around at home. Then, I had the students cut up different colored pieces of paper and let the student’s research to find some growth mindset quotes. I also let students come up with their own positive words to encourage others. This is a great opportunity to teach lessons on a growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset. This was also a project that I invited our school guidance counselor and our success coach in on. These ladies were great and extended the growth mindset lessons in guidance class. They also worked in mindfulness lessons, which were a great connection to this project.
In coming up with a classroom growth mindset jar, the students wanted it to become bigger and I really think they wanted to secretly sneak around our school. They had the idea to make growth mindset type notes for other classrooms that they could secretly put on student’s desks when they were out of the classroom. Since they were already researching growth mindset quotes, this was an easy activity and a fun one for the kids. I just had to make sure to have plenty of colored paper slips cut. I also allowed students to write their own positive messages like, “Have a great day!”. Sometimes we would leave a treat (like a candy cane at Christmas or candy butterflies in February) with the notes. There are TONS of ideas like this on Pinterest.
We didn’t tell the teacher or any of the students. Remember, in order to keep it secret we couldn’t tell anyone, not even the teacher. It was pretty difficult for the students to keep this a secret. They really wanted to tell everyone. This was a great indicator to me that they were definitely motivated by it. But…. I could tell that the secret part needed a little practice. We ended up completing a secret act of kindness to all the classrooms in the building without getting caught in the act, most of the time. I found that it was fairly difficult to sneak 25 students into classrooms without actually getting caught. For the most part, we succeeded. The teachers eventually figured out where the notes were coming from. The students had no idea until we revealed our secret identities after the first few notes.
As some of the older students in the building, they also wanted to set up a big brother, big sister type relationship with a younger class. They would read with younger students, plan fun craft projects to teach them, play board and card games with them during inside recess and take a few minutes at the start of their day just chatting with their person, in a mentor-type role. All of the teachers were more than willing and excited to help make this happen. All of their ideas seriously made my heart melt and were ideas that I hadn’t thought of so of course, I had to help make them happen!!!!
Community Kindness Agents
All good PBL’s (project-based learning) opportunities involve a real-world connection. In addition to kindness serving as a must-have life skill, I wanted to get the kids involved in thinking about workers in our community. Workers that might do an amazing job keeping our community safe and thriving, but don’t ever get thanked. Workers such as the sanitation department, transportation department, road crews, police officers, firefighters, nurses, electricians, teachers, plumbers, janitors, secretaries…. the list could literally go on forever! So again, I had my students brainstorm their list of who they felt may be underappreciated. Those who do their jobs and do them well because it is their job but may be underappreciated.
Once we came up with a list it was time to decide what we wanted to do to show them that we care. A secret random act of kindness. Remember, we are still secret agents here! Students decided to create treat bags that we would secretly deliver. They designed small brown paper bags with thank you messages and filled them with popcorn, candy, and the Pay It Forward message tag that was connected to our class kindness hashtag so we could track the chain of kindness. Students LOVE to check our hashtag so we checked it daily.
The Great Kindness Challenge
In lou of national kindness week of 2020, which officially starts on February 11, 2020, our school is participating in the Great Kindness Challenge. This challenge is all about empowering students to create a culture of kindness. The Great Kindness Challenge is a positive and proactive bullying prevention initiative for PreK-12 schools. Schools that participate in the Great Kindness Challenge are automatically recognized as a Kindness Certified school. This is an initiative that started small but has now spread all across the world.
The goal is to help transform how kids view and treat each other by engaging in small, simple acts of kindness. Acts such as smiling at each other, holding the door for someone, giving someone a compliment, hug, high five or anything that can make someone’s day a little better. This is a great way for teachers to help students spread compassion and think of others. The great thing about this is that kids can inspire adults to be more kind. Kindness is contagious!
Check out my other PBL ideas here.