With the beginning of the new calendar year, we welcomed our first influx of students back onto our campus after a challenging yet empowering year of distance learning. With students learning on campus and virtually, we took on another challenge for ourselves and our student body—The Great Kindness Challenge (GKC). During the week of January 25-29th , COA Elementary joined 17 million other students in over 33,000 schools spanning 115 countries in this week long event focused on being kind.
The GKC is a program initially started in three Carlsbad, California schools to uplift the school climate and culture on campus, and it eventually spread all across the world. All week long, on the same week every year, everyone joins in unity to enact as many gestures of kindness as they can. Checklist in hand, students are given the tools to help inspire them to share kindness with their classmates, their siblings, their neighbors, their teachers, and even strangers.
COA Elementary announced a theme for every day of the week: Monday- Be Kind To Yourself, Tuesday- Be Kind To Your Family, Wednesday- Be Kind To Your Teachers, Thursday- Be Kind to Strangers, and Friday- Be Kind To Everyone. Students were given several ideas on what they could do each day to be kind to someone according to the theme of the day, but the sky was the limit. Our students went above and beyond to make someone’s day all week long. It was a wonderful week of unity and kindness for all of our students, teachers, and staff—especially amidst such trying circumstances and the gap in social emotional learning it has created. The GKC reminded us all once again that there is strength in kindness, and it has the power to change our surroundings and our world.
We are grateful for all of our staff, teachers, students, and families who contributed acts of kindness to those around them all throughout the week and helped to make a difference in some way in our school, our communities, and in our world. Thank you for being KIND!
Daniella Manzyuk,
Student Support Specialist
