Last week, I announced the launch of our Annual Harbor Fund: 100x100: 100% Participation + 100 Acts of Kindness. While our families are working to reach 100% participation in the fund, our classes have accepted the challenge of achieving 100 acts of kindness by the 100th day of school.

At Tuesday’s All School Meeting, we talked about what it means to be kind and brainstormed the many acts of kindness that we do for each other every day. “We can help someone if they get hurt.” “You can share your toys with a friend.” “We can use kind words with each other.” “We can listen to our teachers.” The list goes on and on. We also noticed and discussed that when someone does something nice for you, it makes you feel good which often leads to you being kind to others, what we as adults call “paying it forward.” It only takes one small, simple act to start a chain reaction of kindness and generosity.

When presented with the challenge to reach 100 by 100, the children announced that not only can the whole school easily achieve 100 acts of kindness, each class can definitely reach 100, and each child may even reach 100 acts on their own! One student claimed that “we can probably reach about a billion as a school!”

Our first graders followed the meeting with a writing lesson in which they illustrated and described their own ideas of acts of kindness. Children throughout the school have been pointing out nice things that friends have done for them, and teachers have begun counting acts of kindness in their classrooms. Watch for a display in our main hallway, where we will be posting and counting kind acts, and look for updates in Harbor Highlights where we will share progress toward our goal. We are so proud of our hardworking, kind and mindful students, and we are extremely grateful for your support of The Harbor School, as we work together to get to 100!