Pizza Kindness Challenge to Encourage More Kindness

Inside: Use this Pizza Kindness Challenge to encourage more kindness and give kids lots of chances to practice being kind.

When I was a kid, the best reward was a pizza party. If we did our homework, we could earn a pizza party. If we were celebrating a holiday, we had a pizza party.

We would even get Pizza Hut coupons for reading during the old Book-It program.

My parents would let us celebrate the end of the week with a pizza dinner and a movie rental.

And while there’s no more video rental stores or Book-It, kids still love a good pizza party.

So we can use their love of pizza to encourage kindness with some positive reinforcement that will get kids speaking and acting with kindness more often…which will make kindness into a habit.

More Food-Themed Kindness and Social Emotional Learning Activities:

Since pizza is delicious, it’s the perfect way to sneak in a little learning about social emotional concepts like kindness, gratitude, and thoughtfulness.

Kindness can of course be taught without cutesy themes, but using fun things kids already enjoy- like pizza, cookies, and ice cream- can increase the buy-in and pique their interest. It’ll make learning a little more fun and a ton more hands-on.

We like to play this Apple Kind or Unkind Sort,

and this Cookie Kind or Unkind Sort.

We connect kindness with writing with this Apple Kindness Craft and Write Activity, this Watermelon Kindness Craft and Write Activity, and this Ice Cream Kindness Craft and Write Activity.

We make these Friendship Cookies.

We use this Kindness Pizza to reward kindness.

We use this Ice Cream Kindness Challenge to Encourage More Kindness.

And we use this Pizza Kindness Challenge.

Why Should We Use Kindness Challenges?

We shouldn’t need to praise kids to be kind, they should just want to be kind and then do it.

Well, yes, in an ideal world.

But when we’re intentionally teaching kids to be kind, we have to bring out the big guns and use all the tools at our disposal, including positive reinforcement.

When kindness becomes their norm, their habit, and their gut reaction, then yes, we can wean them off the “rewards” and positive reinforcement.

Kindness is a verb. It’s something you have to do, rather than something you just talk about.

So if we are serious about focusing on social-emotional learning and kindness, we have to teach kids how to be kind with role playing strategies and with social emotional learning curriculum and then give them ample opportunities to be kind.

We have to give them situations where they can practice being kind to classmates, siblings, teammates, friends, adults, and people in the service industry (food servers, mail carriers, trash collectors, custodians, retail staff, flight attendants, etc.)

So to make kindness consistent and more of an everyday activity, we can gameify kindness and make it a challenge (because we know most kids can’t resist trying to “win.”)

We have Monthly Kindness Challenges like this one.

We have a Simple Normal Everyday Scavenger Hunt that kids love.

We have seasonal Kindness Challenges so kids do one kind act a week: Summer Kind Kids Challenge, Fall Kind Kids Challenge, Winter Kind Kids Challenge, Spring Kind Kids Challenge.

We have 100 Acts of Kindness Challenge so kids do one kind act a day and by the time they get to the 100th day of school, they’re 100 days smarter AND 100 days kinder.

But to connect kindness to fun things kids already love, we also have monthly kindness challenges like our Pizza Kindness Challenge.

How to use the Pizza Kindness Challenge

1. Download and print the version you wish to use: black and white to color in the pizza or color version and cross off the pizza slices. (download it below.)

2. Every time one child is kind to another child, they get to color in a pizza slice or cross off a pizza. If you’re using it for students, every time they are kind to another student they can color in or cross off a pizza.

3. When they get to the end of the sheet, they can earn a pizza party, pizza and a movie, or pizza gummy candies.

4. Continue with the positive reinforcement with another kindness challenge so kindness becomes a habit, like our summer kindness challenges.

OR… get our Year of Kindness Challenges here all in one place.

Kindness Ideas to Help Kids Easily Act and Speak with Kindness

Sometimes it can be hard for kids to come up with ideas on how to show kindness to others. But it doesn’t have to be hard when you know there are two different kinds of kindness:

big, loud, showy acts of kindness, often random acts of kindness
simple, normal, everyday acts of kindness that can become habit if we practice them enough

Random Acts of Kindness are fun and great, especially for Random Acts of Kindness Day in February. But the much more impactful acts of kindness take no planning, no props, and no money.