How to Align Random Acts of Kindness to Middle School ELA Standards
“In a world where you can be anything, be mean.”
What?
Have you never heard that saying before? Have you never seen the bulletin boards with big letters spelling, “CHOOSE RUDE?”
No?
Well, that’s because kindness is not exactly a widely debated topic. Everybody is going to say that kindness is important. Teachers, administrators, parents—nobody is arguing against kindness.
But when it comes time to teach a unit on kindness in your classroom, well . . . then people may start to have questions.
What is the academic learning objective?
How does this align with our standards?
Will this help students on state assessments?
In an ideal world, we could teach kindness just because it’s important, but in the real world, we have to justify what we teach in academic terms, so here’s one way to align acts of kindness to middle-school ELA standards: the RAK Narrative.
First, ask your students to brainstorm random acts of kindness that they could do for someone else.
They can use a bubble map to brainstorm ideas for their school, home, neighborhood, extra-curricular activities, and extended family. Encourage your students to jot down ideas that seem too easy, too difficult, and everything in-between. Brainstorming isn’t about coming up with twenty perfect ideas; it’s about throwing ideas out there until they find the perfect one.
Help your students choose the perfect act of kindness for them.
It’s a good idea to send an email to parents to assure them that their kids aren’t required to spend any money or do anything outlandish. Then give your students a few days to make it happen!
While waiting for your students to perform their random acts of kindness, go over a traditional plot diagram during class and review terms like exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, and resolution.
Review ways to slow down the action in a narrative, and make sure your students know how to write different types of narrative introductions and conclusions.
Once everyone has had a chance to complete their random act of kindness, guide your students along their narrative writing journey.
The brainstorming step is already complete, so you can give your students blank plot diagrams and help them decide which parts of their experience fit on each part of the plot diagram.
Next, your students can draft their narratives!
From this point on, you can continue much like you would for any narrative writing unit. You can point out parts of the story that need to be drawn out with dialogue, imagery, or emotion. You can pair students up for peer reviews. Focus on the areas where you know for certain that your students need to grow.
When your students finish the final drafts of their RAK narratives, consider having them share their experiences with the class.
(If your students get nervous in front of a classroom, check out this blog post about how to help students overcome their fear of public speaking.) Listening to all of the joy your students have spread throughout their community will be a highlight of the year.
