Kindness Read Aloud Activity for Chrysanthemum: Mean Words Hurt Hearts

I love using the book Chrysanthemum in my first grade classroom and in our preschool Sunday school class. This kindness read aloud activity is perfect for so many settings because it helps kids see that mean words hurt hearts.

Usually, I do this kindness read aloud activity at the beginning of the school year while we are using books to build our classroom community, but for some reason I didn’t this year.  And now, 2 weeks after Valentine’s Day, this lesson was necessary.  My firsties have gotten a bad case of the meanies!  This truly is one of the sweetest classes I’ve ever had, and they really love each other dearly.  But I think the last few weeks we’ve graduated to a brother/sister relationship between my firsties.  Ya know, cat fighting, name calling, I love you, I hate you kinda stuff???

Chrysanthemum Read Aloud & Kindness Chart

We sat in our class meeting circle on the carpet and read Kevin Henkes’ classic, Chrysanthemum.  I had made a beautiful, clean red heart…. and forgot to take a picture…. because this was not a preplanned activity.  This was a “Okay, everybody stop what you’re doing and come to the carpet right now” kinda lesson.  You know the kind. 🙂

Every time one of Chrysanthemum’s classmates laughed or said mean things to Chrysanthemum, we crushed that clean red butcher paper heart we used as Chrysanthemum’s heart.  The heart got passed around in our circle, so everyone had a chance to crumple the heart.  There is actually not enough for all 25 of my firsties to squish the heart.  So when we finished the book, we talked about other things friends or siblings have said that crush our hearts as we continued to pass it around the circle so that everyone had a chance to crush the red paper heart.  Therapy session 101!

At the end, our heart looked like this…

Preschool Kindness Read Aloud Activity

Usually, when this is a preplanned activity, I use butcher paper to make a large heart and we each sign bandaids promising to be caring and to help repair our friends’ hearts when they are hurt.  But I didn’t have room on my impromptu construction paper heart!  However, I use this same lesson with my preschool Sunday Schoolers at church, and this is what their response page looks like after the lesson.

You can find this kindness read aloud activity and other love & Valentine’s lessons in my Love One Another packet.  Perfect for all year long!