Great Kindness Challenge Week was the week of Jan. 25. This was a week in which many schools across the United States focused on kindness. This was our third year participating in this challenge. When we completed this challenge in 2014, we began giving monthly Kindness Counts Awards to students who exemplify kindness daily and the giving out of caught being kind tickets to students when they are observed engaging in a kind act. We now do those things regularly and they have become important school traditions, and we hold monthly assemblies to recognize these students.

Awardees' parents/guardians are invited to attend the assembly and award winners have lunch with the principal. At Lura Libby School there is now a group of students called the Kindness Ambassadors. This group of students had to apply to join the group. Ten students were chosen based on their ideas of how to spread kindness throughout the school. Applications were open to interested students in grades two through four. The Kindness Ambassadors meet monthly with the principal to discuss ways to spread kindness, plan assemblies, and more.

On Friday, Jan. 22, both schools held kickoff assemblies/kindness rallies to get students revved up for the week ahead. These assemblies were led by the Kindness Ambassadors at Lura Libby School and by some grade three and four student volunteers at Cushing Community School. During this week students at Lura Libby School participated in a Read-a-Thon to raise money for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. A student brought this idea to the Kindness Ambassadors and the group decided it was a good cause to focus on for this week. Each classroom also worked together to write a kindness poem to be shared at the Kindness Counts Assembly. In addition, students made posters and completed other classroom-based activities centered on the theme of kindness.

At Cushing Community School each classroom came up with their own service project idea. They also completed other kindness activities including, but not limited to, making Valentine's Day cards to various organizations (animal shelter, children's hospital, nursing home, etc.), taking a nature walk to be kind to nature, completing anonymous hearts with kind thoughts about other students, creating kindness posters, and more. There was a wrap-up assembly held on Friday, Jan. 29 at both schools that included sharing of student work from the week in the area of kindness, singing of the song A Kindhearted Hand, and awarding January Kindness Counts certificates and Most Caught Being Kind tickets for the month certificates.