“”A smile. It’s is a simple thing. Have you ever stopped to think about how causing the corners of someone’s mouth to curl upward into a smile can positively change their mood or even their day? First-graders at North Woods International School have. The kids decided to make the world around them a better, happier place by bringing people together with something as simple as a smile.
“We talk with our students about what it means to be responsible, how our actions have a positive or negative impact, and how we can understand others’ perspectives,” said North Woods teacher Tara Schuttenhelm. “Our first-graders were so excited to talk about how small actions can make a big difference.”
The students brainstormed ways to track these small but impactful actions and came up with the “Pass a Smile” project. They suggested creating their own paper smiles to give to others while performing acts of kindness for those around them in the community. Each smile has a link to a class-built website where people can leave a comment or story about what made them smile and how someone helped them. The website lets the first-graders record how many people they have reached.
“When we gave people in our schools the smiles they were really happy and then I was so happy when people smiled, that I smiled,” said North Woods first-grader Tyler Hinton.
The students also keep track of where their smiles reach on a world map hung on the wall outside of their classroom. The class hopes to send smiles as far as possible.
“People like to get a smile every day and I think they want to smile,” said North Woods first-grader Jorgan Lee. “So we thought doing this could help send a smile or a bunch of smiles all the way around the world.”
North Woods’ smiles have traveled as far as Luoyang, China to teacher Leah Justin during her six-week exchange program. Justin’s students adopted the idea to help the project grow.
The first-graders have received dozens of comments and stories of kindness along with words of thanks for their good deeds and their positive impact on others on their website, passasmile.weebly.com and on social media with #PassASmileNWI.
“One good deed may seem small, but it can encourage someone else to continue the cycle of kindness,” said Schuttenhelm.
Join the fun by downloading smiles created by the students to share on their “Pass a Smile” website and by doing small acts of kindness while giving smiles to neighbors, friends, family, and other members of the community. The first-graders came up with a list to get you started.
Some ideas to pass a smile:
- Ask your neighbor if they need help with their yard work
- Hold the door open for someone
- Do a chore for someone
- Return someone’s cart at the store
- Compliment a friend
- Make a card for someone
- Write kind chalk messages on the sidewalk
- Make someone else’s bed
- Send a postcard to a friend or family member
“”””[vc_single_image image=”14896″ img_size=”625×417″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://passasmile.weebly.com/”]””
