SC Elementary celebrates February with ‘Kindness Store’
CCN – SC Elementary celebrates February with ‘Kindness Store’
By Rita Brhel
Sandy Creek fourth grader Dawson Black surveyed the room—curling drinking straws and brightly colored pencils among the assortment of items on the $1 table, an array of books on the $2 table, and a variety of toys on the $4, $5, and $6 tables.
Black glanced at the “kindness cash” he had been earning for the past month and considered how he would use it.
But there was a twist to this incentive.
Last Friday’s Kindness Store—the brainchild of first-grade teacher Krista Calderon—was the culmination of a month-long activity designed to promote kindness among Sandy Creek Elementary students, Kindergarten through fifth grade.
Kicking off during the Great Kindness Challenge, a national bullying prevention initiative that ran Jan. 27-31, Sandy Creek’s challenge rewarded students with paper tokens—called kindness cash—for teacher-observed acts of kindness, such as helping to clean up the classroom or holding open a door.
“All the kids earned something,” Calderon said.
The kindness cash was then redeemed in her classroom on Feb. 28 in another act of kindness—using each student’s earnings to exchange for up to two items that would be anonymously gifted to a randomly assigned classmate.
Gift items were donated by SC staff as well as Jessie Anderson on behalf of Waypoint Bank in Clay Center and Cheryl Brockman on behalf of Pinnacle Bank in Fairfield. Helping Calderon with planning the challenge was SC’s ACHIEVE teacher Jennie Schultz and fourth-grade teacher Melodie Spurling. Edgar’s Lyndsey Pohlmeier and Jeana Lipovsky, of Fairfield, helped manage the Kindness Store as parent volunteers.
Calderon mentioned that the entire event went smoothly.
“The kids were excited for it,” she said, “especially the younger kids. I was surprised by the older kids being excited for it. I would see kids in the hall, and they’d say ‘I said this’ or ‘I did this’ for kindness cash.”
Calderon learned about the Kindness Store idea a little over a year ago and had tried it out as a Christmas gift exchange with her then-first graders in December 2018. That success inspired her to expand it to Elementary-wide, tying it into the month that hosts not only Valentine’s Day but also another national kindness campaign, the Random Acts of Kindness Week of Feb. 17-21.
“And to help get through the flu season,” Calderon said.
Kidding aside, she commented that the overarching goal of the SC kindness challenge was accomplished—“to make kids more self-aware and to realize that when someone’s kind to them, to be kind as well, to pay it forward,” she said.