Kindness Thrives at Flower Hill School

Teaching Flower Hill Primary School students about the concept of kindness and how it can be displayed in a variety of everyday life situations is meaningful to faculty and staff members. This is marks the fifth year that Flower Hill participated in the Great Kindness Challenge.

“The Flower Hill Primary school community prides itself on ‘choosing kindness,’” Principal Cindy Siegel said. “On a daily basis students recite the ‘Flower Hill Four’ - Be Respectful, Be Responsible, Be Safe, Be Kind.”

The Great Kindness Challenge was observed worldwide last week. Last year, over 18 million students attending more than 36,000 schools in 115 countries performed over 920 million acts of kindness according to organizers of the initiative.

“The Great Kindness Challenge is a proactive and positive bullying prevention initiative that improves school climate and increases student engagement,” states the organization’s website. “The Great Kindness Challenge is one week devoted to performing as many acts of kindness as possible on campus.”

“We empowered our students to create a culture of kindness,” Ms. Siegel said. “Each day the entire school community represented kindness in different ways.”

On Monday, it was “Dream of Kindness” as students and staff wore their coziest pajamas. Tuesday was “Team Kindness” day as Flower Hill showed how it works as a team by wearing its favorite sports team’s jersey.

“On Wednesday, we went ‘Crazy for Kindness’ with students and staff getting creative in creating zany hairdos and mismatched socks,” Ms. Siegel said.

“Powered by Kindness” was the focus on Thursday. “We became powered by kindness and dressed as our favorite super hero,” Ms. Siegel said.

On Friday it was “Flower is Kind” with everyone wearing Flower Hill attire.

“We had a great time spreading kindness and we continue to do so throughout the year,” Ms. Siegel said.

Flower Hill students were given an Acts of Kindness checklist and were encouraged to display different acts of kindness throughout the week. The youngsters obtained stickers and words of encouragement when they were “caught being kind.”

Flower Hill has also been involved in a global service project called “Kind Coins for Our Earth.” The 2023 campaign is a unifying service project to help clean up the oceans.

“Our school will collect coins until April 20, 2023 in order to fund cleanup efforts to make our oceans clean and safe,” Ms. Siegel said. “This will also teach our students that doing small acts of service and kindness can go a long way! The project will be led by Mr. [Glenn] Edwards and the third grade kindness squad.”