#32 Leave encouraging notes in my students' desks, one a day

I have this note that my friend Tiffany wrote me.  It probably didn’t take her long to write it.  It actually started as a thank you note, but she added a few extra lines to the end.  I’m sure she didn’t realize that it was just what I needed to hear, that I would cry for a half and hour after opening it, or that I would keep it in a drawer and pull it out to read so often. 

My note from Tiffany
Its really a note from God, via Tiffany...
but that's another blog entirely!

           Kind words can have this effect on people.  I wanted to give this kind of encouragement to my students, so I decided to write a nice note to a student every day and leave it in their desk.  As I thought about how to execute these “nice notes”, I had a better idea.  Instead of getting one nice note from me, my students would 25 nice notes….one from me, and one from each of their classmates.  Like most fourth grade classrooms, we have our share of unkind things said on the playground and spats between students.  I thought that if students had to write nice notes for everyone in their class, they would have to spend some time examining what they like about each other.  

           

         I introduced the idea to my class and they were excited.  Every morning, before we started class, I passed out 4x6 index cards to each student and we wrote something nice about the “person of the day” (we went in alphabetical order).  I wrote three sentence frames to put on the board to help them come up with nice things to say.  There were a few things we had to discuss as the days went on.  For example, if you say “This is hard” while trying to think of something nice to write about someone, it will probably hurt their feelings!  I had to make a rule that if you wrote “You are great”, you had to say WHY they are great.  And, I had to tell one student that if she wrote “You’re good at four square” on every single nice note, it lost its sincerity.

When it was a student’s turn to have nice notes written about them, I made them write one to themselves.  These ended up being my favorite ones to read (I read them all before binding them with ribbon and delivering them, just in case someone wrote a not-so-nice note…which, incidentally, never happened.  They always wrote nice things to each other….I was very proud of them).  One student wrote to herself “Good luck in your acting career!”, many wrote, “You’re good at  (insert sport here)”.  One little girl wrote, “You’re sort of a good artist”…I crossed out the “sort of”.  

I also loved reading what they wrote to each other.  I only required one sentence, but some students regularly wrote 2 or 3.  Some of them were pretty basic, like “You’re good at math” or “You’re funny”, but others were really thoughtful:

“I like that you never get down on yourself or give up”
“You’re good at making people feel good about themselves”
“You cheer people up when they are hurt”
“You always play fair at recess.”
“You’re nice to everyone, no matter what”
“I love you’re unique sense of style”

       

               Reading these nice notes myself was great.  So was delivering them to eager students and watching them pore over them, grinning from ear to ear.  But, my favorite parts of this whole experiment have been the times that I have watched students pull their nice notes out of their desk and reread them, days or weeks after receiving them.  Even when I had to tell students to put them away and pay attention to my lesson, I did it with a smile on my face.  Like my note from Tiffany, they can pull their notes out when they need to be built up.  When they’re feeling down about themselves, they can be reminded of all the wonderful qualities that others see in them, and be encouraged. 

P.S.  Do you know how many BFF’s a fourth grade girl has?  According to our nice notes, they’re pretty much “BFF’s” with every other girl in their class. Seriously, it was an epidemic.  I didn’t address this, though, because the sanctity of “best friendship” is a lesson more effectively taught by experience.