BubbleUp Take5: Gratitude

​Next week is Thanksgiving in the United States (how did we already get to the end of November?). There is a lot going on in our country right now and while I've been consuming enourmous amounts of media, I felt like this week, it was worth it to share some things that I have discovered on gratitude.

1. This article from Newsweek entitled 5 Scientifically Proven Benefits of Gratitude is a great place to start in order to understand the "whys."  It offers reseach-driven ways gratitude can improve your life. 

​2. I love a good social media challenge. This 30-day photo challenge offers a word and a more detailed prompt for each day. A challenge like this could easily be adapted for the classroom (use Padlet instead of a social media tool), shortened to a week (ask students to choose one of the 30 suggestions each day for 5 days), or used as starters for writing.

3. Gratitude: A Powerful Tool for the Classroom, a piece from Edutopia, addresses the positive effects of incorporating gratitude into classroom culture. The author shares examples of how adding gratitude journals made a difference in his own classroom and links to other resources on approaching gratitude in classroom instruction.

4. Berkeley's GreaterGood: The Science of a Meaningful Life is a phenomenal resource that addresses the science of well-being and offers practical strategies and skills to "foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society."  There are a lot of really interesting articles on the site. Two that spoke to me:

• ​Vicki Zakrzewski offers a list of Gratitude Activities for the Classroom. Her ideas could be modified across age and grade levels and even rolled out in a school-wide setting. Building a gratitude graph could be a fun math-related activity, gratitude paper chains are a great way to display multiple gratidues.
• And because we are all professionals in a workplace as well as teachers, the  article entitled Five Ways to Cultivate Gratitude at Work offered some helpful solutions. It's important to not only teach our students to be grateful, but also to share that with co-workers and colleagues.

From Investing in Children

​5. Finally, because I believe that there is a place for picture books in every classroom and every library from preschool to adult, this list of 19 Children's Books About Gratitude can help all of us find titles to bring into our instruction.

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How do you teach gratitude? What is your personal gratitude practice and how we can apply this to our classrooms and libraries? Do you have any favorite stories you use to share gratitude with your students? 

We are incredibly grateful for our readers and cannot wait to hear from you.

Gretchen

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You might also like:

• Forget the New Year's Resolution. Try a Teaching Intention. (January 3, 2017)
  
• Building Community: Mix Chalk with Gratitude (September 13, 2016)​