IMLAY CITY — It doesn’t cost anything to spread a little kindness.
That was the mantra of students at Imlay City Schools’ Borland Elementary last week as a group of kids led by third-grade teacher Shelby Stoddard created the building’s first ever Kindness Day.
Last year, Stoddard founded the “Kind Kids Club,” a group dedicated to sharing positivity throughout the building, and by accident, said Borland Principal Megan Cottone, Stoddard discovered that World Kindness Day was Tuesday, Nov. 13. “She came up to me the day before and said ‘did you know there’s a World Kindness Day?’” said Cottone. “We thought of ways to spread kindness to the whole building.”
Stoddard said the Kind Kids Club’s mission was always to spread kindness, so it was a perfect coincidence World Kindness Day happened to roll around. “We always talked about how to brighten someone’s day,” she said. “We all brainstormed together and came up with some ways.”
To start the day, Stoddard’s Kind Kids Club crew and a few student volunteers, holding posters featuring positive affirmations, lined the entranceway at Borland Elementary to greet their peers as they arrived for the day. Student volunteers arrived at 8:15 a.m. and stood in the cold as they waited for peers to arrive, and they did it with a smile. “It turned out really nice,” said Cottone.
According to Stoddard, the kindness even spread to some of the parents who were dropping their children off for the start of the day. “I could see a lot of parents smiling in their cars,” she said.
During lunch, kids were challenged to sit with peers they might not regularly interact with. Each table in the cafeteria had “conversation starters,” featuring questions like “What superpower would you want?”
The event went over so well, said Cottone, that they’re already planning on ways to extend the message behind it beyond a single day each year. “It’s shouldn’t be contained to just one day,” she said. Stoddard agreed. “We were thinking it’d be cool to just kind of repeat this, maybe monthly, have that line-up greeting to start the day,” she said.