Avalon Kindness Club- JAM3 was established in 2019 by the kind kids in grades K-3. We had a total of 38 children that were ready to spread kindness to our Avalon community and school. The club was held after school with the help of amazing staff! The kindness club could not have been possible without the help of Miss Burns, Mrs. Majerac, Mrs. Galupi, Mrs. Persson, and Mrs. Riley. The kids cannot thank them enough for all they did to help get this club of the ground and running!
Our first community project was making tissue paper flowers and writing short notes to make people smile. The kids were more than eager to get this project started. It took them no time at all to create these flowers and notes to deliver to community members. Next step… the delivery! The students and staff took an afternoon to distribute these flowers to businesses and people in our Avalon community. One of our police officers even offered to buy us pizza for our kindness!
Mrs. Klicker approached our club in mid-March to offer us the opportunity to raise money for JAM3 by selling flowers at our high school’s musical. We didn’t want to keep all the funds we made…near this time we had a Northgate family that had suffered the loss of their father. We knew this was the perfect opportunity to spread kindness and love to a family in need. $300 of the proceeds were donated to our Northgate family. It was an amazing feeling to help and put a smile on someone’s face.
JAM3 knew that spreading kindness could not just be for the community, we knew we had to make our friends and teachers smile as well. Some of the kindness we spread to our school was hiding Easter eggs filled with notes and stickers that we hid in the building for others to find. We also made creating recycled flowers to hand out to our teachers on Teacher Appreciation Day. The hidden Easter eggs were a huge hit! After we started hiding eggs we noticed mystery notes in our girls restrooms! Kindness was catching on!
One of the most fun days of the week at Avalon is now “Welcome Wednesday”. Every Wednesday we welcomed students and staff to school (in our #bethekindkid shirts of course)! The kindness club lined the sidewalk leading up to the school, held signs, danced, and smiled. This quickly became the highlight of the week.
During our welcome Wednesday parties outside the kids noticed that the garden in front of the school was looking a little sad. The kids had the idea to adopt the garden and create a “Kindness Garden”. They used one of our club meetings to clean out the over grown area. This summer Miss Anderson will be working to complete the garden so it is ready for next school year. During our field day at the end of the year we painted kindness rocks that will be placed in our garden to add some beautiful color.
The last activity of the year was our community night that JAM3 decided to name KINDNESS FEST 2019! Our Kindness Club decided to break up into smaller groups so we could give to more community organizations. Each group came up with their passion project for Kindness Fest. The students met with Miss Anderson and Miss Burns with their idea, cost, materials needed, and who or what the project would benefit. The children did an amazing job coming up with ideas on their own and running their booth on May 16, 2019 at our first community kindness night. The students raised OVER $400 at the event, as well as, collecting two boxes of items to be donated to the shelter project. The other organizations that benefitted from our Kindness Fest were Animal Friends, The Shepherd’s Door, and New Hope.
Jam3 had a successful first year thanks to Pittsburgh Commitment to Kindness and JAM Enterprise. We can’t wait to continue the initiative next year and to grow JAM3 at AVALON!
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