"Kindness grows when it’s nurtured"   Lisbet Chiriboga

This is a super cute book to read to your class if you are considering a plant as a class pet :) 

The Worlds Best Class Pet

When looking through the rethinking schools website I came across this sweet story .  A teacher was thinking of getting a  class pet for her kindergarten classroom and after exploring the option of having a small animal she decided against it. She made some really important points about what having a live animal with a nervous system in the classroom can look like. Some of the smaller animals are social beings and living alone can cause stress. They are often picked up and that creates stress. They are alone in cages or tanks and in the evenings and weekends and then at the end of the school year are taken home but a volunteer that may not be so psyched about caring for a small animal.  "Our plants, by contrast, offered lessons about empathy and responsibility, without putting anyone at risk". 

The teacher decided to use spider plants as the class pets. She talked about how some of the students come from areas in which there is very little green space. Each day the students took turns watering the plant, checking the soil, making sure they got enough sunlight and were so excited to see signs of a healthy plant and growth when  "baby shoots" started growing off the mother plant.  The students were encouraged to speak to the plant softly each day. "Caring for the plants became a favorite classroom job, passed from one student to the next each week, with the outgoing caretaker proudly teaching the new one how to water gently “not too much, not too little” and how to speak softly while caring for them, practicing gentleness, patience, and attentiveness". What important life lessons to be learned though such a simple activity. 

This was also an exciting real life example to use across the curriculum. "When we studied science, the students understood the connection between sunlight, water, and growth in a way no textbook could teach". Other ways to incorporate plants in the classroom could be reading about other types of plants and then maybe even a little math to see how much the plant has grown overtime!

Plants offer other positive benefits as well. Some of you may already know that plants can help filter the air in an environment, they remove pollutants and release fresh oxygen. Plants can also lower stress and anxiety in individuals and increase creativity. 

In closing the author says "Kindness grows when it is nurtured". We can say this about so many aspects in life. From human babies grow when they are nurtured, to relationships, to intellect and mindsets. 

I think I will put some plants in my health office this fall and see what may grow :)

Lisbet Chiriboga (lisbetc@teachkind.org), a former kindergarten teacher, is now senior program manager at TeachKind, the humane education division of PETA, 501 Front St., Norfolk, Virginia, 23510; TeachKind.org.