It’s not the Olympics or a hockey game, but “Go Team,” is the mantra of an all-boys Grade 5 class at Hillcrest Elementary.
The 22 boys in Tyra Menzies’ class are learning to be flexible in their thinking and to look beyond themselves.
Principal Alan Harrison says of the 45 Grade 5 students enrolled at the school, only nine are girls – girls who, since kindergarten, have been a very small minority in their classrooms.
This year, staff decided to put all the girls together in one class before they go off to middle school, which resulted in one all-male classroom.
“I think it’s been very successful; the girls are quite happy to have time together and the boys are enjoying it too,” he says. “The credit is to Tyra Menzies – she’s focused on a program called Mind Up, a program all about how your brain works, and using flexible social thinking to be part of a team.”
Harrison says being on a team and contributing to it is very attractive to the boys who, at about the 10-year mark, are just beginning to focus beyond themselves.
Menzies agrees and says she concentrated heavily on flexible thinking for the first three months of the year – giving the boys the team-building vocabulary and messages in a variety of ways, including role playing.
“Once the notion is in their heads, it’s incorporated everywhere,” says Menzies, noting everyone worked hard to build the TEAM, which stands for Together Everyone Achieves More. “We work as a group to choose to be our best selves in order to improve each other and the team.”
And the team members are not just thinking beyond themselves, they’ve looked beyond their classroom to take kindness into the community.
“The Great Kindness Challenge is something I’ve been doing for five years in my Me to We class – we make ‘we thinking’ more of a focus,” Menzies says, noting the boys recently visited several places in groups of three: to the hospital, where they gave a little stuffy to a lady who was coming out of surgery, to Landers Lodge to play cards with the residents, the fire hall where they delivered Timbits and Tim Hortons where they opened doors for patrons. Another group took cookies to the workers at the sewage treatment plant where staff showed the boys how they clear chemicals out of the water.
“One of my favourites is we went to the school board office to say thank you and then went next door to the Children’s Association,” says Menzies enthusiastically. “They explained why they were there and said, ‘thank for the service you provide to the community.’ Three of the ladies were crying.”
In her annual kindness challenge, Menzies offers students a list of about 40 ideas, some that are comfortable, for example, smiling at people at a store, and others that put them out of their comfort zones – like spending 40 minutes at a seniors’ facility.
Out in community for about two hours, the students perform about 30 acts of kindness.
“It’s the most important thing that I do. It’s unbelievable the amount of feedback I get from that day,” she says. “I don’t see it pre-trip, but so much value comes out of it.”
Menzies says her students really get the fact that a little kindness goes a long way and does matter. “You don’t have to give something; it be can be as simple as a kind word, a thank you or ‘have a happy day.’”
This year’s Menzies’ boys also became acquainted with the concept of pay it forward.
When they gathered back in the classroom, the students discussed the fact that many recipients of their acts of kindness had said they would, in turn, pass a kindness on to someone else.
There was a sense of satisfaction and elation when the boys realized just how big a chain of kindness could blossom from their 30 kind deeds.