Friday Features; Kindness

This week in the library our focus was on kindness.  We do have Character Counts! at our school but I really wanted to get at the idea of each of us making another person feel special.  The world would be a better place if we could all make that happen. 

I read Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud and David Messing to each class except kindergarten (they had Eric Carle).  Even the 5th graders listened and it opened up a good discussion of what each of us could do to fill someone else's bucket.  A first grade student said that the bucket is like your heart!  Ah, thank you [big teacher smile]  He understood the message. 

With that book I read one of my all-time favorite picture books, Stand Tall, Molly Lou Melon by Patty Lovell and David Catrow.  The message and the illustrations come together into one outstanding tale of being true to yourself.  We conversed about bucket fillers in this book (Grandma and Molly Lou) but also that Ronald Durkin learns to be less of a bully and more of a bucket filler by the end.  I found this great Molly Lou video by Spoken Arts. 

I also read Todd Parr's It's Okay to be Different and Carrie Weston's The New Bear at School.  I read Todd Parr all the time to kids but Weston's book was a new read aloud and perfectly transmitted my kindness message.  Stay tuned for more as I look forward to more kindness next week. 

Do you have book favorites that share this message?  Any book suggestions would be much appreciated!

I also finished off a beginning of the year order and sent it off to my secretary just because Jana at Milk and Cookies; Comfort Reading waxed poetically about getting her first school order of books for the year.  I had to jump on the bandwagon!

Happy Friday!