Kindness and Respect

What can you do to promote kindness and respect in your child’s life?

Kindness and respect are all about being friendly, generous, and considerate to others and oneself.

We, as parents, carers and community, are our children’ s best role model. 

Take time to:
– Recognise the efforts of those around us.
– Acknowledge when our children are kind, eg., “that was a thoughtful thing to do.”
– Talk to your children about the experience of other people and families. 

Children will learn empathy and kindness as they come to understand that everyone is not the same. 

After school, ask questions such as “did you notice who was kind to you today?”  or “did you help someone today?” 

What are we doing at GAP? 

We are always focused on being kind at GAP by promoting warm, responsive and trusting relationships. 

Some of the ways we explore kindness include:

– Pointing out acts of kindness and respect throughout the day.
– We’ll have a chat during circle-time about ways in which we can be kind and respect each other.
– We talk with the children about ways in which we can encourage each other.
– We’ll set the children a mission to do something kind for another person in the playground, and report back so we can discuss it at circle time.
– In one-to-one conversations, we’ll ask the children to tell us things that they are good at or things that make them a good friend.

Respecting and being kind to yourself is just as important.

Our commonly used kindness and respect phrases at GAP:

“Wir sind alle freundlich” (we are all friendly), “die Guete” (kindness).

The theme of kindness and respect leads nicely towards other areas of well-being, such as friendship, empathy and sharing.