Prompt: You’ve been asked to do a five-minute presentation to a group of young schoolchildren on the topic of your choice. Describe your presentation.

If I had a chance to speak to young schoolchildren on a specific topic I would choose ‘kindness’.

I chose this instead of the extension of kindness, ‘compassion’ because I thought that they would understand that word better. This is what I would say.

“Today I would like to speak to you on the topic of being ‘kind’ to others. I’m sure your parents and others that care for you have taught you about being kind but I’d like to give you some examples of when that might be very important to do.

The place to start being kind is of course where you live and to the people who also are in the home. It might be your parents. Sometimes it is easy to think of your parents as pretty well, the ones who look after you and give you a home, food to eat, clothes to wear, who take you where your need to go and the ones who protect you and care for you when you are sick. What you might forget is that they need you to be kind to them and that might be shown in how you cooperate with them when they ask you to do something without giving them trouble or arguing that you don’t really want to do it. An example of this might be cleaning your bedroom, or picking up your toys in the living room, or even to go and wash your hands for dinner. You would make them so happy if you could do these types of things willingly. This is being kind to them.

Another example of who you might be kind to are perhaps older people such as your grandparents or other people that you know, perhaps a neighbor. When a person gets older sometimes they get lonely because they don’t have a lot of visitors or people to make them feel important still. By talking with them and even perhaps taking some flowers from your garden, with permission from your parents of course, or maybe some cookies, would I believe bring some joy and happiness into their lives.

One more example of the importance of being kind, is to your friends but even more importantly maybe someone who is not your friend because they don’t make friends easily. Perhaps they are very shy, or perhaps they are different in some way so that some children don’t make friends with them. It may be that they don’t dress like everyone else, or they don’t speak like you do or maybe they are a different size than most children your age. They most especially need someone like you to be kind to them and to invite them to play with you and to have fun just like everyone else.

If we all showed ‘kindness’ to each other then we wouldn’t have a problem with ‘bullying’ and I think most of you know what that is. That’s when some children pick on others because of the reasons I spoke of because they are different maybe in some way.

So today, maybe you could think of this special word ‘kindness’ and look for people and ways that you could show it to.”