World Kindness Day is a wonderful opportunity to weave empathy into your language lessons and inspire students to practice kindness all year long. Kindness goes beyond being nice; it’s about respect, supporting friends, and creating a sense of belonging. These values help students feel valued in your classroom and show them the importance of making others feel included too. Here are a few simple ways to bring kindness into your lessons and set the tone for a compassionate classroom community:
Kindness Vocabulary: Teach expressions like gracias (thank you) and eres una persona única (you are a unique person) in the target language. Adding a new phrase each day builds a strong foundation for kindness vocabulary.
Kindness Hearts: Brainstorm acts of kindness together, then have students write one on a paper heart. Create a “kindness garden” display to keep motivation high all week!
Daily Kindness Challenge: Set small goals, such as greeting a peer or helping with materials. These daily acts add up and encourage students to spread kindness naturally.
Clip Chat with Kindness Videos: Watch a short kindness video, then discuss it in the target language. Guide students to describe what they see, share how they feel, and make predictions. This Clip Chat activity strengthens language skills while reinforcing kindness in context. Read more here.
Compliment Circle: Create a habit of sharing compliments in class! Each student takes a turn giving positive feedback to a peer, encouraging a warm, supportive classroom environment.
Using these ideas, you can make kindness a key part of your language lessons, creating a warm and inclusive environment for all. Let’s celebrate World Kindness Day and spread a little extra kindness this year!
There are different alternatives to the regular or commonly used Valentine’s Day activities. One of them is to invite your students to think about what fills their hearts and brings joy. This heart mapping activity has been designed with novice proficiency levels in mind but can certainly be adapted for other levels by prompting students to delve deeper into their thoughts and either write or present their reflections.
Students are prompted to create a visual representation of their inner world, mapping out the aspects that bring them joy and love. It serves as a personal exploration of the diverse aspects of one’s life and the connections we might have.Through engaging in this activity, students can reflect on what matters to them and express gratitude for the relationships, activities, and experiences in their lives. This activity offers an opportunity to celebrate love in all its forms!
To bring this activity into your classes, you’ll first need to download the template here, Additionally, be sure to bring along your own example to share with your class. As language teachers, it’s important to model the activity for our students to facilitate comprehension. After presenting your model, a suggestion would be to brainstorm the different components of the activity with your students. Once you have done this with your students, invite them to work on their own heart activity. The results will make it a wonderful product to share with caregivers and the school community.
Zoom burnout is real! After I completed my 3rd week teaching online, one of the things that made me tired the most was the amount of time I was spending in front of a computer every day. Some of my students were not only attending our Zoom classes but also having to complete assignments afterwards. One of the things I appreciate is when my own kids get assignments from their teachers that invite them to be creative and away from the computer. With that in mind, I wanted to think of ideas children can do at home to a least get them to think in Spanish a bit.
Here are some off-screen activities you can recommend your students do at home. ClickHERE to download them all:
Label the rooms in the house.
Classify objects by color
Group objects by number
Play a counting game in Spanish.
Play hopscotch naming things in Spanish. If there is not chalk available, make a small hopscotch on a piece of paper to play with your fingers. Time each person who plays it and see who can do it fastest.
