Free Compliments Lesson & Activity

Raise your hand if you'll kindly take a nice compliment?  Well I certainly will (I'll raise BOTH hands to that).  I recently did a lesson with my awesome 4th grade students on "the POWER of your words".  I got this lesson idea from a fantastic session on Lessons that Sparkle presented by Julie Ford, a creative and super energetic school counselor from Oregon City Schools (Ohio) at the ASCA conference this summer.

Julie shared a lesson using the book Mr. Peabody's Apples written by Madonna.  This book tells of how words from others lead to rumors that can be very hurtful and cannot be taken back.  On a side note, this book was quite hard for me to find in store.  I had to check out a copy from the public (not school) library, but I have a great alternative...Madonna reads the book on YouTube!  Click here to see the video.  

After discussing the book and how words can hurt I asked the students, do they like to receive compliments.  Of course they responded YES and I told them that they would have the opportunity to give all their classmates a compliment, because compliments are powerful words just like hurtful words (which is very true).  Here's what I did:

-I cut colored (plain white is fine also) paper in half and gave each student a sheet.

-I had the students write their names on the paper and leave the paper on their desks.

-I told the students that they would rotate around the room and write something nice on every person's paper.  I also made note that even if they didn't know the person very well there's always something nice to say, i.e. you have a nice smile, you're nice, you have neat handwriting, etc.

-During the compliment writing I did monitor around the room to make sure that nice things were being written (hello, these are great students, but they're still kids!)

Students write compliments

More compliment writing

Well evidently by the compliments, this student is quite the artist !

This activity was a HIT with the students!  They were really into writing the compliments with their classmates. A bonus is that at the end of the lesson everyone gets a nice parting gift... a reminder of all the compliments that their classmates wrote about them and oh yeah we had apples (Mr. Peabody's Apples, make sure you read Julie's great lesson for more inspiration). 

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