Oh, this book will have your heart.
Every Little Kindness by Marta Bartolj is a strikingly beautiful book with a big message, all without a written word to be found on the page. This wordless picture book does not need text to take readers on a powerful journey of kindness. The beautiful images moving from character to character bring the lesson to life.
The overall theme of this book is simple: One small act of kindness leads to another and may ultimately come back to you in spades.
The book begins with the main character looking for her missing dog. She’s sad and heart-broken, but still offers a stranger a small act of kindness on her travels. Someone nearby sees this act of kindness and is inspired to pay a new act of kindness forward to another person. This beautiful chain reaction of kindness continues until the kindness is returned to the original character who started it all.
It’s the perfect book to spread a message of kindness far and wide, prompting discussion on what it means to be kind, how kindess can have a large ripple effect and how the little things in our lives make a big difference. Here are some questions you might pose to students before and after reading this book:
Before Reading:
- What does it mean to choose kind?
- Has someone ever offered you a random act of kindness? How did it make you feel?
- Have you ever completed a random act of kindness for someone else? How did it make you feel?
- Do you think that one act of kindness can change the world? Why or why not?
After Reading:
- How did one random act of kindess change the lives of so many people?
- How are poeple rewarded for their random acts of kindness?
- What’s a random act of kindness you might offer someone today?
After reading, readers will likely want to include a bit more kindness in their own lives, too, especially when paired with a bit of action.
The Random Acts of Kindness organization offers an inspirational calendar with daily prompts to spark kindness in our lives. Here’s the current calendar for this month:
These calendars can be used to encourage daily kindness in your ourclassrooms and better yet, offers us a model to create your own. As a class, list 31 ways to spark kindness in our classrooms, schools and families. Curate these ideas onto a printed or digital calendar to share with families and watch the kindness continue forward, just as it did in this beautiful book.
Choose kind.
