Inside: Celebrate the 100th Day of School with 100 acts of kindness with this free printable: 100th Day of School Kindness Activities.
When I taught my younger elementary school students, we all loved counting down to the 100th Day of School. It was always something we looked forward to celebrating in February.
So when the day came around, we treated it more like a holiday than just a silly day.
My students brought in 100 items they counted out, we spent the day creating 100 day crafts and doing 100 day math, and I baked them a cake shaped into 100 with 100 candies on top.
We wore silly 100 day hats and did 100 exercises and ate 100 snacks.
So now that we focus on social emotional learning and practicing daily kindness, we can incorporate kindness into the 100th Day of School activities.
As we work towards the 100th Day of School, we can do one kind act a day with our 100 days of Kindness Activities and Certificate for the 100th Day of School.
But on the actual 100th Day of School, we can also do 100 small, tiny, but powerful acts of kindness in one day with these 100 Acts of Kindness for the 100th Day of School.
Why Teaching Social Emotional Learning is Essential
Kindness begins at home. But so many of our students come to us from homes that don’t place value on kindness. Or they live in homes where their basic needs aren’t being met so kindness can’t be the focus.
So even though teachers already have enough on their plates and are stretched too thin, it comes down to educators to teach sel curriculum.
Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL, covers skills like understanding and managing emotions, building relationships and maintaining friendships with others in positive ways, treating others with empathy and acting on that with compassion, and making responsible choices.
How to be a good friend.
How to cheer on others and give them compliments.
How to take turns.
How to play fairly.
How to be honest and trustworthy.
In essence, how to be a good person.
But why is it essential that we teach this at school?
With all the standards teachers have to cover, is this really essential?
Do we really need to make time for it in our classrooms?
Social-Emotional Curriculum is essential in our classrooms because children who feel ostracized, excluded, lonely, or bullied won’t be able to focus on schoolwork. And if we unintentionally create a classroom community that allows exclusion and teasing and bullying, our students won’t feel safe to raise their hands or safe to play or safe to be themselves.
In order to get our students to be able to learn what we need to teach them, we have to create a positive and safe learning environment so they can find success.
The good news is we can intentionally teach our students to speak and act with kindness more often and create a community of kind children, ready and able to learn.
If our kids leave our classrooms and can read and write but laugh when others fall or tease classmates for making mistakes, then we will have not done our jobs fully.
If we’re teaching the whole child, we can’t just teach academic skills.
Social-emotional learning and character education teaches our students how to be the best versions of themselves and helps them spread their kindness and empathy and compassion with the world around them.
Here are 8 Reasons Why We Should Teach SEL.
Here are 10 Simple Ways to Teach Social Emotional Learning.
And we make being kind fun with games and activities like this 100 Acts of Kindness Printable.
How to Use the 100 Acts of Kindness for the 100th Day of School:
1.Print out the version you wish to use: color or black and white. (download it below).
2. Make a copy for each student.
3. On the 100th Day of School, celebrate with 100 acts of kindness by doing 10 kind things, 10 x each:
- 10 High Fives to Classmates
- 10 Hellos to others
- 10 Asks: “How are you?” to others
- 10 Friendly Notes Written
- 10 “Thank yous”
- 10 Pieces of trash picked up
- 10 Times helping a classmate
- 10 Compliments given
- 10 Smiles to people you don’t know
- 10 Asks: “Can I help you?”
Resources to Help Your Students Complete Some of the Tasks:
Free Compliment Notecards to print off
Friendly Notecards to print off
4. Challenge your students to do kind actions all day and give them time during the day to complete the kind acts.
5. They can check off or color each box as they finish and can color in the pictures if they have the black and white version.
6. If they don’t finish on the 100th Day of School, they can keep going with the kindness until they finish.
7. Celebrate their kind acts and being 100 days smarter!
Download the 100 Acts of Kindness for the 100th Day of School Printable here.
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