Fun with Character: Kindness Infection

Read the following poem to the class.

Smiling is Infectious by Spike Milligan

Discuss if they think smiles are contagious. Do a quick activity called Pass the Smile. Explain that you will all pass a smile around the room and describe the order it will take, i.e., across the rows, from table to table, etc. Secretly time how long it takes to pass the smile around your room. (For a math connection, you can have older students calculate how long it would take to pass it to the whole school.)  Optionally, after you do it once, you can challenge them to pass it faster the second time.

Kindness Epidemic

This activity will mimic spreading kindness like the smile that was passed. You will need enough pinch-type clothespins for each student. Write smile, its synonyms, a smiley face, or kindness infection – whatever your class will react to the best – on the clothespin. Go around the room and pick five students to infect by giving them a clothespin to clip on their clothes. They need to infect others in the class. Give each infected student a handful of clothespins for them to give out. You have the choice of it being obvious, like smiling at someone and giving them the clothespin, or it is secret, and they sneak up on them. They will do this over the course of the day and not all at once. See how long it takes to get everyone infected. If someone is already infected, they can’t accept a new infection. Make sure there is a way for them to wear them in an obvious way, so they know who to infect. If you need to have this span more than one day, make sure the students leave their clothespins on their desks, so they have them for the next day.

Options:  You can use smile stickers or large Band-Aids instead of clothespins. The band-aids should be out of their wrapper and have smiles or the word kindness written on them. Students will wear the Band-Aids on their clothes like a sticker. (Be aware that stickers and Band-Aids are not kind to some fabrics, so be sure to advise students if they are wearing something that should not be stickered.)

Optional next steps:  if you used clothespins, ask the students if they would like to teach this exercise to a younger class or even an older class. If you didn’t use clothespins, you would just need to acquire more stickers or Band-Aids for the other class.

Depending on the age of your students, you could get a small group to volunteer to plan how to do it for the whole school.

To process the activity, ask these or similar questions:

Pass the smile

• How did it feel to pass the smile around?

• Did knowing that it started with a single smile make smiles seem more important?

• How easy was it to smile when someone smiled at you?

• Will you be more likely to notice smiles after this and smile back?

• Will you be more likely to start smiling?

Kindness Epidemic

• Did you like this activity?

• Is the idea of an infection scary, having just lived through a pandemic?

• Have you ever thought about good things being contagious?

• How did it feel to receive a Kindness clothespin from someone?

• How did it feel to give a Kindness clothespin to someone?

• How would it feel to be the last one to receive a Kindness clothespin?

• Do you think it is important for each student to continually be kind to others, so no one feels left out or last?

• How did seeing the clothespins start to appear on the other students make you feel about how this class treats each other?

• Do you think that this activity will help you to remember to be more kind to everyone?