EthicsElementaryPrimary
How to teach kindness
For elementary students, kindness is something they do: invite a student who is alone, ask about them and stand up for them. This page explains what kindness activities should practice, with a free role-play where Sparky plays a new kid at lunch and answers the way that kid would.
Jemel Fanfan | Founding Member at Flint
"Flint AI has become essential to my daily routine. I rely on it for differentiating instruction, writing comments, planning lessons, managing recess duty schedules, and developing rubrics."
Beonka Caldwell, 4th Grade Teacher at The Kinkaid SchoolWhy this matters
Many elementary students believe kindness is one polite sentence, such as "you can sit with us." The new kid sits down, nobody asks them anything, and lunch ends with them as alone as before. On a worksheet, "I would invite them to sit with me" earns full marks, and the teacher has to wait for a lonely lunch or recess to find out who knows what to do after the invitation.
What kindness activities for elementary students should practice
Greater Good in Education, from UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, says kindness "always includes the intention to benefit other people", and that elementary students "may view kindness mainly in concrete ways" (Greater Good in Education). CASEL's SEL framework names the skills a kind act uses (CASEL). Kindness activities for elementary students can practice four of them as actions:
- Include someone: invite a student who is alone to join a game (Greater Good in Education).
- Help or comfort someone: help a student who has fallen, or comfort a lonely one, as the same Greater Good page describes.
- Show concern for their feelings: notice how the other student feels and respond to it, which CASEL lists under social awareness.
- Stand up for them: CASEL lists "standing up for the rights of others" as a relationship skill.
In the Flint activity, each student practices these with Sami, a made-up new kid Sparky plays, who sits alone at lunch. Unlike a worksheet, Sami answers back: a vague kind line gets a shy one-word reply, and a real question or plan gets Sami talking.
Sparky gets Ava past "you can sit with us"
Ava ends up asking Sami about recess, standing up for Sami's drawings and making a plan for after lunch. Every student meets the same Sami at the same lunch table, and Sami's answers depend on what each student says.
Ava
Ava
im ava. i would walk over and say hi you can sit with us if you want
Sparky
Coach: You said "you can sit with us," and Sami said "ok" and looked back down. What could you say next so Sami actually has something to respond to?
Ava
ok so sami sits with us. i say this is jordan and maya. what do you like to do at recess?Sparky
Then Jordan leans over, looks at the sketchbook, and laughs. "Drawing animals? That's so babyish." Sami looks down and goes quiet again. What do you do now, Ava?
Ava
i would say jordan be niceSparky
Coach: "Be nice" stopped Jordan, but it didn't bring Sami back into the conversation. What could you say or do next to help Sami feel included again?
Ava
drawing isnt babyish i draw comics every day. sami can i see your animals? you could draw a dog for my comic and we could play four square after lunchSparky
Understanding check
Ava
before sami felt embarased and like nobody wanted them here. after sami felt happy because somebody liked there drawingsWent from one polite line to a real invitation, then stood up for Sami
At the end, Sparky asked Ava why "you can sit with us" by itself wasn't enough, and she wrote "sami just sat there and nobody talked to them. you have to keep going." Ava is an example student, and Sparky's replies are shortened.
What Flint did for Ava
- When Ava stopped at "you can sit with us," Sparky played Sami answering "ok… thanks" and going quiet, so Ava saw the line wasn't enough.
- When "jordan be nice" left Sami silent, Sparky quoted Ava's words back and asked what would bring Sami back in, without writing her next line.
- After Ava asked to see Sami's animals and planned four square, Sami opened up and Sparky asked how Sami felt before and after.
A teacher can't do this by hand for 30 students, and Sparky does it in every student's chat.
The activity page shows who still stops at one kind sentence
While the class works, Needs attention shows the teacher which student is stuck and on which message. After three or more students submit, activity analytics lists what the class did well, where students went wrong, and a follow-up to practice next.
Example activity page
After a 4th grade class practices kindness at lunch
The school and students are made up for this page.
Set up the activity for free
Open the kindness activity in Flint's public library, select Use activity to copy it into a free Flint account, and assign it to a class. Sami's backstory, Sparky's coaching guidelines and the greeting are already written. Students type their answers and Sparky replies in writing, so the role-play needs no extra setting turned on.
For more ethics activities, see Flint for ethics.
Other use cases
See all use cases →Computer ScienceComputingHigh schoolKey Stages 4 and 5
How to teach logic gates
How to teach logic gates: what AND, OR and NOT gates do and how a truth table lists every input. In a free Flint activity, each student wires an alarm circuit to a client's spec, writes its truth table and gets a hint about the row their alarm gets wrong.
MathematicsMathsMiddle schoolKey Stage 3
How to teach math to English language learners
ELL math strategies for multilingual learners: give the key terms in each student's home language, teach the words before the problems, and match each question to the student's level, shown with a free linear equations review.
Social StudiesHumanitiesElementaryPrimary
How to teach Native American regions
Teach Native American regions through the homes each nation built. Students move four homes between four regions, a student who says a nation built its home because they liked it gets sent back to a region card, and a right answer gets a harder question.
