Inside: Use this St. Patrick’s Day Kindness Challenge to encourage more kindness during the month of March and give kids lots of chances to practice being kind.
St. Patrick’s Day has always felt a little lucky to me ever since my baby brother was born on the holiday. And even though we’re only a wee bit Irish, we lean into the holiday and have fun with leprechauns and leprechaun “traps” and eat Lucky Charms.
St. Patrick’s Day is fun, no matter how you celebrate.
And in our home, we choose to celebrate with green food, green clothes and sunglasses, and a ton of kindness.
The green stuff is pretty easy. But the kindness can be a little harder. So we use this St. Patrick’s Day Kindness Challenge to encourage our kids to speak and act with kindness more often all through March.
More St. Patrick’s Day Kindness and Social Emotional Learning Activities:
Since kids absolutely love all things holidays, St. Patrick’s Day is the perfect excuse to sneak in a little learning about social emotional concepts like kindness, gratitude, and thoughtfulness.
Kindness can of course be taught year round (and should be!) but we have great St. Patrick’s Day activities themed for March to make learning a little more fun and a ton more hands-on.
We love to tell people we’re lucky they’re in our lives with these St. Patrick’s Day Kindness Notes.
We use this Shamrock Kind or Unkind Sort during St. Patrick’s Day.
And we use this Shamrock Kindness Craft and Write.
And we also can create these Lucky Shamrock Shape Poems has a fun way to focus on why we’re so lucky and to focus on gratiude.
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 a specific month, we also have monthly kindness challenges like our St. Patrick’s Day Kindness Challenge.
How to use the St. Patrick’s Day Kindness Challenge
1. Download and print the version you wish to use: black and white to color in the shamrocks or color version and cross off the shamrocks. (download it below.)
(P.S. Here’s the difference between shamrocks and clovers.)
2. Every time one child is kind to another child, they get to color in a shamrock or cross off a shamrock. If you’re using it for students, every time they are kind to another student they can color in or cross off a shamrock.
3. When they get to the end of the sheet, they can earn some St. Patrick’s Day treats, some “gold,” or some quality time doing a “special” activity like extra recess, extra screen time, or a trip to the library to get St. Patrick’s Day books.
4. Continue with the positive reinforcement with another kindness challenge so kindness becomes a habit, like our Easter Peeps Kindness Challenge for April.
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.
Here are some kid-friendly simple, normal, everyday acts of kindness they can start doing now:
- smile at someone you don’t know
- invite someone to sit down
- greet people when you walk past them
- hold the door for the person behind you
- write someone a sweet note
- let someone else go first
- cleaning up after yourself so the next person can use the space
- help someone who is hurt
- invite someone to play the game
- return a lost item to it’s owner
- say excuse me when you need to get past or if you bump into someone
- moving your things out of the way so someone else can sit down
- throw away someone else’s trash
- share your supplies
- take turns with a game
- give a compliment
- help someone who needs it
- ask the new person to join you
- help clean up a mess you didn’t make
- give a hug or a high-five
- cheer someone when they do something hard
- get a sibling or friend a snack/water/juice when you get your own
- ask if anyone wants to split the last treat
- thank someone for helping you
Ready to spread more kindness during March and St. Patrick’s Day?
Get the St. Patrick’s Day Kindness Challenge here.
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