Nice Words

I have been meaning to update my blog the past two weeks, but things spun crazily fast after Thanksgiving break and so I have not gotten around to it. So begins my first post to "catch up" on what has been happening with my class over the past two weeks.

I was looking at blogs one day (not too surprising :-) ) and stumbled upon this great activity to do with kids to help them understand the power of words. My class was being mean to each other and so I stopped class and did it. It worked so well! For an entire week my students were only being nice to one another and I did not have one conflict to solve. It was amazing.

I had my students take a piece of white paper and crumple it up into a ball. They had so much fun doing this! We were laughing and having a good time with it. I told them not to rip it though. Then I had them unfold the paper without ripping it. Of course our papers were all wrinkled now. I then told them to apologize to the paper. They looked at me with that "you are crazy" look. But I told them, it was fun for us to crumple the paper but the poor paper was really hurt by it! They apologized to their paper trying to hold back giggles. I asked them, did your apology take away the wrinkles? "No..." Of course it didn't. The same is true with people. We are all nice and pretty looking "pieces of paper" but when people come and tease us, call us names, tattle, hit us, take our things, etc. we become wrinkled by it all. The mean people might apologize but it still doesn't take away their hurts just like the paper didn't loose it's wrinkles.

I of course was rather dramatic when saying all this by picking up a new piece of paper and crumpling it a little bit each time I mentioned something mean that had happened in our class. It hit home with my kids. What was a happy laughing fun paper crumpling class suddenly became very solemn and you could see the Lord working in their hearts. One students said, "You're making me feel bad." Well...that is a good thing, dear. It means you understand and God is speaking to you.

We kept our crumpled papers on our desk throughout the week and one was up on the white board too. It was a great week of no-conflicts and only students being nice to one another. :-)