Love and Kindness
Year 1: Love and kindness helps us to make lots of friends.
Core story
On Sudden Hill by Linda Sarah and Benji Davis. Two friends play on Sudden Hill. One day a new boy wants to join in and is accepted, but one of the original pair doesn’t like the change. This is a story about a change in a friendship group, and reminds children that you can have lots of friends.
Drawing out the virtues
Talk about the idea of having a ‘best’ friend. Do you have to have a best friend? Can you have more than one friend? How does it feel not to have a best friend? Could it be that you haven’t met them yet? Can you be friends with lots of people at the same time? What does it feel to be new? How can we make friends? Why was Shu a good friend in the story?
Activity 1: What makes a good friend
Ask pupils to sit in a circle on the carpet, and think about what makes you want to be someone’s friend.
Encourage them to think about their friends, and why they like them, remembering even the smallest things e.g. he/she smiled at me in the line, or helped me find my homework yesterday. Write down the key words – e.g. smiley, helpful, funny, honest - each time, and encourage them to use more interesting vocabulary e.g. jolly, calm, courageous, plays-fair, positive, trustworthy, hilarious, hardworking, generous, polite etc.
You could turn this into a spider diagram or even a display, with “What makes a good friend?” in the middle, and all these words spiraling off it in chains and individually.
Activity 2: Kind Hands
Ask pupils to sit in a circle on the carpet. Place a bowl of warm water in the middle of the circle and explain to the children that you are going to pour some special (glittery or beautifully scented) soap into the water. This makes a ‘kind hand potion’. The children take turns to wash their hands in the potion.
The children can discuss how this makes their hands feel different. Now the children all have kind hands, ask them what kind things might they do? Take some suggestions from the children.
Children can then paint hand prints which can be cut out and stuck around the edge of a display board. Explain to children that when they see another member of the class doing something kind, they can recognise them by moving their handprint to the centre of the board. Children could write a sentence on the handprint to say how that person showed kindness e.g. I saw Tom lending Fred his football boots when he had none of his own, Kate invited me to play with her when I was on my own.
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Classroom language
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I saw X showing kindness to his friend by…
How could you show kindness to your friend?
In this class we have kind hands.
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Library books
Dogger by Shirley Hughes
The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco
The Cathedral Mouse by Kay Chorao
The Value of Friends – a Jataka Tale
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves by Margaret Early
Puss in Boots by Charles Perrault
A Bit Lost by Chris Haughton
Ebb and Flo and the Baby Seal by Jane Simmons
Lovabye Dragon by Barbara Joosse
Jamaica and Brianna by Juanita Havill
The Biggest Thing in the World by Kenneth Steven
The Bog Baby by Jeanne Willis and Gwen Millward