Students grow with Acts of Kindness Tree
1
2
PELHAM - At Pelham Elementary School, they take bullying - and kindness - seriously.
Earlier this month, the children pledged to notice acts of kindness and practice them themselves. Just to be sure they don't forget, they have an Acts of Kindness Tree.
Conceived by Sarah Winston, a teacher's aide, and executed by her husband, Jared Winston, a woodworker at Architectural Components in Montague, the 8-foot-or-so tree has branches with every Pelham Elementary School teacher's, staff member's and student's picture on it.
The Winstons, of South Deerfield, and Debby King, the school counselor, unveiled the Winstons' arboreal creation at an all-school assembly, asking children to write the name of someone whom they have seen being kind to another person on a leaf and tape it to the tree.
"The idea is to fill up the tree," Sarah Winston said.
To get the children thinking about the meaning of an act of kindness, teachers asked them earlier to illustrate an act of kindness they have observed.
"An act of kindness is when you go out of your way to do something nice," Sage Bailin, a fifth-grader, wrote.
"I fell off the monkey bars. Then Sophie helped me go to the nurse," wrote a first-grader named Hanna.
"It goes along with the bullying and teasing curriculum that we've had for years. We try to teach empathy a lot, and we have a very strong zero-tolerance policy for unkindness," King said.
Teachers in Pelham are constantly on the lookout for bullying and teasing, Principal Rena Moore said. She called the Act of Kindness Tree a "spring strengthener."
Winston, a graduate student at Antioch University in Keene, N.H., said the tree is way of bringing the acts of kindness that take place in individual classrooms into general view.
At the assembly, children volunteered many instances of kindness they had observed recently. One boy gave another boy a chocolate, for example, and it turned out to be a two-for-one act of kindness, because the recipient gave the chocolate-giver a hug.
Asked by Moore if they had any questions, the students unleashed a dozen or more queries about the logistics of the tree. How would they get it through the gymnasium door to its final destination in the hall, one boy asked. Another wondered whether children might bump into it. One boy wondered what would happen if they ran out of leaves, and another student questioned why they would be putting leaves on the trunk.
Melanie Barrows, who is new to Pelham Elementary School, wondered whether her photo was on the tree.
It was.
