Crater Elementary students Collins Olsen and Elena Fletcher and several other fifth-grade leaders, supported their school’s month-long event, The Great Kindness Challenge (GKC), by creating three skits.
GKC is a global initiative designed to help students and families inspire an atmosphere of kindness and compassion at school and home. Collins, Elena, and their classmates’ skits helped launch the GKC at Crater during a Jan. 30 assembly. The skits demonstrated acts of kindness, such as helping someone who has fallen or talking to someone who seems sad or lonely. Collins and Elena explained why showing others that you care matters.
“People need to feel welcomed and loved because otherwise you’re going to be sad and you’re not going to enjoy life, and you just need that love sometimes,” Collins said.
Elena said that there are times when kindness is especially important.
“Kindness is a way to help others get through hard things,” she noted.
The other students who participated in the skits seeking to inspire compassion in their classmates were fifth-graders Jocelynn McCormic, Willa Rimrodt, Bennet Brown, Merrick Stutzman, Tyleigh Conway, Ruby Pickell, and Gavin Porter.
After the skits, Principal Brian Wood told students that, this month, all students would receive a flyer with a list of kind acts on it, and he encouraged them to complete as many of the acts as they could by Friday, March 1 to be entered into a Kindness Challenge drawing.
Wood asked students to share with a neighbor the ways that others have demonstrated kindness to them.
“Kids were able to own the learning and share with classmates all of the unique ways they have either been kind or received kindness from others,” he said later that day.
Assistant Principal Lacey McNay encouraged students to continue in the spirit of the challenge even after it was over.
“We’ll keep spreading kindness and making the world a better place to be,” McNay said.
Photo: Crater Elementary fifth-graders Elena Fletcher, left, and Collins Olsen explain that people need kindness, especially in tough times.