Inside: Use these kindness placemats for snack time or lunch time in early childhood classrooms.
My kids no longer eat snack at their desk and lunch inside their classroom.
But when they were younger and we were in early childhood education classes, that’s all they did.
And each year, their teacher would give them a plain piece of construction paper with their name on it.
Nothing bad, but nothing great either. It was a wasted opportunity to sneak in a little learning at the same time as eating.
So we can use snack time and lunch time to focus on kindness and social emotional learning with these Kindness Placemats.
Kids can eat and hear positive reinforcing affirmations and kindness messages as they snack on their cheese and crackers.
Small Ways we Can Introduce Social Emotional Lessons Into Every Day
Ideally, we would introduce social emotional lessons each day and give dedicated curriculum time to it. But that’s not always the reality for many classrooms.
Related: 8 Reasons Why Educators Should Teach Social Emotional Learning
So if dedicated lesson time isn’t available to teach kindness and empathy and helpfulness and how to be a good friend, we can focus on building a positive classroom environment.
And there are ways we can “sneak” kindness into the cracks of our already busy days.
We can play a quick game like this Kind or Unkind Sort.
We can read kindness books like these and color kindness bookmarks.
We can hang up these Kindness Posters as reminders of how to act with more kindness.
We can connect the alphabet and animals to acts of kindness with this Kindness Zoo Coloring Book.
We can make Kindness Craft like this Friendship Flower.
We can introduce kindness topics and beginning reading skills with this free I am Kind at School Emergent Reader.
And when kids are eating, we can use these Kindness Placemats for snack time or lunch time.
How to Use the Kindness Placemats:
1.Print the version you wish to use based on how much your kids/students want to color (download them all below).
You can choose food items or kind actions as the images.
You can choose color or black and white version for kids to color.
2.Go over the words with your students, reading each sentence, like kindness affirmations.
3. Kids can color their placemat. Offer them skin color crayons so they can color the clip art to be as diverse as their classmates.
4. Write their name or have them write or trace their name.
5. Glue their placemat to a larger piece of construction paper so there is a border around the placemat.
6. Laminate and cut each placemat so they’re reusable and can be easily wiped down and sanitized in between each snack or mealtime.
7. If you wish, use the kind words on the placemat as kindness affirmations and say them before, during, or after lunchtime or snack time.\
These placemats alone won’t make kids be kind. But, they are another way to bring more kindness into kids’ lives on a daily basis and normalize kindness and kind words.
Download the Kindness Placemats here.
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