Kindness in a Jar by Little Footprints Preschools
Nurture Education Group Curriculum Specialists tell us about their kindness projects
Start Small Dream Big (SSDB) invites the youngest members of our community to give back in their own little ways! Every year, preschools from all over Singapore initiate six-month-long community projects during which little minds and hands get to work on improving their society.
Join us these upcoming months as we interview teachers, celebrate with preschoolers, and bring you heartwarming stories from the ground! (Not to mention amazing projects that you can try with your family!)
This week, we bring you not only a new, exciting Start Small Dream Big project, but also a peek into the brains of two Curriculum Specialists from Nurture Education Group!
Pooja Vishindas and Jyotika Kapur, who worked on Little Footprints Preschool’s Kindness in a Jar project, come up with character-building initiatives year-round. They were eager to share their thoughts with us — from coming up with activity ideas, to observing how kids respond to them, to very sweet stories of children saying the darnedest things!
What is Little Footprints Preschool’s project for this year’s Start Small Dream Big?
Jyotika: Our project this year was Kindness in a Jar, which is a collaborative activity involving parents and children.
Parents encourage their children to perform kind acts or notice kind acts. And every time this occurred, the children could pick up some tangible, recyclable item — like bottle caps — and put it in their Kindness Jar to fill their jar with kindness.
Pooja: We also gave our children the platform to share with us some of the acts of kindness that they had performed and what their parents added to the Kindness Jar. So, the children got the opportunity to build confidence through speaking in front of their peers and teachers, and they got to talk about the values that they’d picked up through this experience.
Why collect recycled materials instead of, perhaps, notes documenting the kind act?
Pooja: Because you talk about values, especially with young children, it’s important for the kids to connect the learning point with something tangible. This initiative is targetted at children as young 18 months, and recycled items are things that they can just pick up around the house and put into their jar. The project is intended to be eco-friendly; we want the kids to value their environment while they’re carrying out acts of kindness.
Jyotika: We also wanted to make sure that parents would find it easy to do. Writing it down on a piece of paper is a bit of a hassle, compared to simply picking up a nearby item. And for pre-nursery kids, paper and writing wouldn’t be as meaningful that it would help them recall the lesson learnt. It’s a more meaningful activity for the children when you praise them on the spot and encourage them to find an object to commemorate that act of kindness.
Were you expecting any challenges when planning Kindness in a Jar?
Jyotika: It wasn’t a challenge at all! In fact, we were very grateful! This project actually helped us realise that as long as we come up with initiatives that are in line with Little Footprints Preschool’s mission and projects that benefit the centers and the children, our centers are very excited to collaborate! Kindness in a Jar was a very simple project, yet it was happening and it was creating an impact with our children.
How do you introduce concepts like kindness to young children?
Pooja: We use a lot of concrete illustrations. For example, we had this activity that used toothpaste to illustrate the effect of unkind words, in which the kids would squeeze the toothpaste out of its tube. Then we’d ask them, “can you put the toothpaste back in the tube?” So, the kids would try to put the toothpaste back in, and they would realise through experience that they cannot do that and that the toothpaste will never be the same again.
“Can you put the toothpaste back in the tube?” — Pooja
Jyotika: The toothpaste will never again look the way it used to be, so this teaches kids that we need to be very mindful of the words we say. Once the unkind words have come out and they have hurt someone, you can never take them back.
After the activity, we leave a picture of toothpaste or a tube of toothpaste in the classroom so that every time the children saw it, they’d remember the experience they had. When we leave that picture of toothpaste there, teachers don’t have to repeat themselves either. So, the documentation of the lesson in this way is important because it is purposeful, meaningful, and it is something that the kids can relate to.
Do you have any tips for effectively teaching values to children?
“It’s simple activities like this that help to inculcate a range of different values…” — Pooja
Pooja: Having a lesson plan will help to introduce values to the children. Storybooks, songs, games, crafts, and role-playing can be helpful tools during these lessons.
When the children were learning about perseverance, we had them engage in a little competition: they worked in small groups and persevere to build the tallest tower in class using legos. On top of that, the kids learn this within groups. Even though the main value to be learnt from the activity is perseverance, they learn to share and work together with their peers towards a common goal. It’s simple activities like this that help to inculcate a range of different values that we want to see in our children.
“It was very sweet that the children were so sensitive even to the needs and feelings of a teddy bear.” — Jyotika
Jyotika: We did a role-playing activity on ‘Caring’ with one of our playgroup classes that ended up being quite funny. The objective of the lesson was for the children to learn to care for each other. The teacher brought in an “injured” teddy bear; she put a bandage on it and said, “The teddy bear is hurt. What do we do?”
But in one particular classroom, the teacher put red paint on the bandage to make the experience more real for the children. All the kids started to cry. It was very sweet that the children were so sensitive even to the needs and feelings of a teddy bear. After that, the children started bandaging each other. Whether the bandage stays on or comes off doesn’t matter. The purpose of that role-play was to get the children to have an emotional response, and it was a question of how we can elicit that emotion without using real pictures (that’d be too scary).
Little Footprints Preschool has many character-building lessons throughout the year. Tell us a little more about it!
Pooja: Essentially, this project is about instilling kind values in our children. We have our own program called ‘Vitamin C’. It is a character program where the ‘vitamins’ stand for values, and the ‘C’ stands for character. In Vitamin C, we aim to plant the seeds of values and boost character development in our children.
When we train our teachers and principals for Vitamin C, we emphasise that they have to be good role models to their children through the way they interact with each other. Teachers play a crucial role in making sure that the Vitamin C program runs effectively in the schools.
Jyotika: In fact, there’s a really great story where one of our teachers had to be a role model for the value ‘Courage’. When she was talking about courage to her class, a cockroach appeared in class and she had to deal with it. At this point, the children told her, “You need to show courage.” It was a nursery class, so imagine a 4-year-old telling his teacher, “Be courageous.” When she was sharing this with us, she told us that the Vitamin C program does well when the teachers themselves display the values that they are teaching.
What goes through your mind when you’re coming up with a new activity?
“We try to close as many gaps as possible to make it easier for teachers to carry out these activities.” — Pooja
Pooja: First and foremost, we think about whether the activity is relatable; it must relate to the children at their level, it must be fun, and it must be something that principals and teachers will find both exciting and easy to carry out. We need to be able to effectively implement our programs at the school level.
We try to close as many gaps as possible to make it easier for teachers to carry out these activities. For example, if we want them to celebrate World Water Day, we will come up with activities so that the teachers will have a base to work with and to spur their creativity further.
We try to close all the gaps. Whatever we can do to help our teachers, we try to think of it.
How do you carry out Vitamin C activities?
Jyotika: In Vitamin C, we dedicate 10 weeks to each value. We’ll pick a value like ‘Courage’ and for ten weeks, the children will work on understanding and exploring courage in its different forms. Courage can be about many things; it can be about doing what you believe is right when others disagree, it can be about trying new things. We have a couple of tag lines for each value. For courage, it was “I try new things with courage,” and, “I am brave.” The children will keep hearing these tag lines while they connect with our lessons on courage.
“[Children] remember the experiences that have an emotional impact.” — Pooja
Pooja: We are not here to create short-term memories. We’re trying to create long-term memories. Kids create meaningful long-term memories when the activities are fun and engaging, and when they are discovering and asking questions like, “Why can’t I do this,” and, “What are some of the unkind things I’ve said?” Even as we’re speaking right now, you’ll only remember certain points from this conversation because they made an impact on you. It’s the same with children — they remember the experiences that have an emotional impact, whether they remember a lesson as fun or whether it turns out like the teddy bear activity.
How did Singapore Kindness Movement support Little Footprints Preschool’s project?
“Singapore Kindness Movement [is] doing important work by bringing their message and programs to schools all over the country.” — Jyotika
Jyotika: We’ve been collaborating with Singapore Kindness Movement (SKM) for three years now — we started in 2014. They send us resources to use in our kindness projects and lessons; they’d send us the Singa and the Kindness Cubbies characters, big books for storytelling, and some kindness activities. We inject those resources into our own programs like Kindness Jar and Kindness in a Row.
SKM helps to place emphasis on kindness and they’re doing important work by bringing their message and programs to schools all over the country. We really benefit from this because we believe that we need to start teaching children to be kind to one another from a very young age.
Pooja: Coming up, we’re hosting a workshop for parents on teaching kindness at home. SKM is sending us their guest speaker to give a free talk to our Little Footprints Preschool parents because they are so passionate about kindness and they want to spread their message. We collaborate closely with SKM quite frequently and we find that these kinds of initiatives help us further anchor our school’s mission. We love them because they are great people to work with, and because they continually support us as we work towards this common goal of teaching kindness to our little ones.
Little Footprints Preschool carries out innovative projects all year-round! Follow them on the Little Footprints Facebook page so you don’t miss out!
While you’re there, maybe you’d like to drop by our LittleLives Facebook page too?
