Today I’m grateful for the many recent opportunities I’ve had to share that empathy, compassion and kindness are KEY; my most recent visit found me coming home to Westwood Elementary, where I was a school counselor for 14 years. Book? Check. Ukulele? Yep! Puppet? Got him. Antique key ring and large kindness key? Ready to unlock the magic.
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So I got to lead ten 30-minute sessions and I left there exhausted but exhilarated.
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What fun to teach them about empathy, sing with them, read to them and laugh with them as we discovered all about Mr. Quigley and the story of his keys to connection, then leave them with a kindness key and a challenge for them to unlock hearts, their imaginations, the future.
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When I posted online that I was putting yarn onto the kindness keys for our preK kiddos, the mom of one of the 5th graders that I subbed for reached out with the kindest offer; she asked if she and her family could sponsor the keys for my next few growth sessions. I sent her a link sharing what I typically purchase and voila, by Friday morning, sweet Cecily was delivering 1K keys for my upcoming visits in this beautiful blue Mustang bag. Be still my beating heart.
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Isn’t that the most thoughtful thing? Turns out that we go way back, because I was her brother’s school counselor 8 years ago when her family first came to town. You just never know when a kindness shared will boomerang its way back to you.
Do a kind act; it’ll boomerang back! Give kind, get kind, just like that.
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I also got to visit this sweet class virtually in Clifton, TX recently; they had some amazing questions for me as they were digging into author’s purpose, illustrator’s purpose, literary elements, editing and more. I reminded them that an author’s work might have a due date, but it’s actually never done because we can always make it better and I encouraged them to hoard words like a coin collector treasures his/her coins, something my 8th grade teacher taught me that I’ve never forgotten.
Finally, I got to spend some time encouraging and loving on some mentors in a neighboring town, super fun for me because I reconnected with Keri, the teacher whom I actually started my Character Counts! journey with back in the year 2000.
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I will always cherish the connection we had and the opportunities that came our way to present the six pillars of charACTer together. She is a spark plug of compassion, joy and hope.
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I’ll leave you with this footprint: The writing’s on the wall in the Westwood cafeteria in the shape of a shoe; this visual display just begged me to teach the learners this little ditty about empathy. Try it with a snap, pat, clap rhythm or use the motions to the hand-jive song. Invite them to jazz it up or rock it out to seal the deal on just how important it is that we make walking in someone else’s shoes a daily ritual until it becomes a life-long habit.
Happy November, dear reader.