By ARDEN BASTIA Erin Giuliano has been teaching for 17 years in Warwick, and her favorite memories are of Kindness Week at Park Elementary School, part of the Great Kindness Challenge, a worldwide event that promotes compassion and joy. The Great
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Erin Giuliano has been teaching for 17 years in Warwick, and her favorite memories are of Kindness Week at Park Elementary School, part of the Great Kindness Challenge, a worldwide event that promotes compassion and joy.
The Great Kindness Challenge takes place in 115 countries, with more than 16 million students and educators participating worldwide.
“It’s such a great reminder for students that we’re not alone,” Giuliano said of the global reach of the project.
Giuliano is currently a second grade teacher, and one of the faculty members leading the Kindness Week activities.
Each day throughout the week, Park students have a chance to participate in events like crazy hair day, hat day, and school spirit day. Throughout the week, students are encouraged to add good deeds and acts of kindness to the Kindness Tree hanging in the front of the building. The poster contest held during the week is Giuliano’s favorite part. Students can illustrate what kindness means to them, and their artwork is hung up in the hallways throughout the building. Warwick police officers and firefighters will judge the posters on Friday. “That’s my favorite part, to see their interpretations of kindness covering the walls of the schools,” she said.
Park Elementary has also hung a banner in the atrium that reads, “Be the ‘I’ in Kind”, where students can stop for a photo opportunity and pose as the letter “I”.
“We needed something that brought our school together as a community,” said Giuliano in an interview. “This is something that our faculty thought would be a fun way to inspire something amazing in our students.”
Even though COVID-19 did interrupt some aspects of the week, Giuliano says they’re making the best of an unusual situation.
All students, both in-person and distance learners, are allowed to participate in events. For those students who are distance learning, Giuliano says teachers have encouraged them to decorate their at-home learning spaces with positive messages and images.
Giuliano’s second graders are also partnering with high school student mentors from Juanita Sanchez High School in Providence. “It’s been pretty amazing,” she said of the mentorship program. “They’ve been really great with our students, reading books about kindness together. It’s a great connection that I hope continues and spreads.” Giuliano says it’s important for young students to have inspirational role models.
“The faculty came together and worked together to create this amazing week of fun and inspirational activities,” said Giuliano, who is thankful for coworkers who are just as excited about the event as she is.
“I only heard about this when I came here, and definitely could not do it without the help of my colleagues,” she said in an interview. “Getting everything together, and making copies, and making sure students have access to all the information, it’s definitely a team effort.”
Another event Park Elementary students are taking part in is the Kindness Unite paper chain, which will hold the Guinness World Record for longest paper chain. Along with students from all over the country, students at Park are decorating strips of paper with kind, hopeful messages to form the links. The strips of paper will then be sent to California, where Guinness will assemble the chain. “It’s something the world definitely needs right now,” said Giuliano.
“At the end of the year last year, we talked about their favorite parts,” Giuliano says of the end of year reflections she does with her students. “And many students mentioned the kindness challenge as their favorite memory.”
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