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This Week · Kindness

Kindness: can kindness be quiet and still count?

For littler ones: If you're kind and nobody sees, does it still count?

Kindness — Can kindness be quiet and still count?

This week we're wondering about kindness — the quiet kind. Not the kind that needs a thank-you or a crowd watching, but the small kind, the hand held out when nobody's keeping score. Can it be quiet and still count? It's a good thing to turn over in the car or at the table, because the kindest thing anyone at your house has ever done may be the one nobody saw.

This week's stories

Classics

Beauty and the Beast

A frightening beast in a cold castle, and the girl whose plain, steady kindness reaches him long before anyone else would have bothered to try.

American

The Christmas Truce of 1914

On a freezing battlefield in the First World War, soldiers who were ordered to shoot each other climbed out of the trenches instead — and shook hands across the mud one Christmas night.

American

The One-Room Schoolhouse Teacher

A teacher in one small room who knew every child by name, taught all the grades at once, and gave quietly to children who had almost nothing — and asked for no thanks.

Talk about it

  • Have you ever done something kind that nobody noticed? How did it feel?
  • The soldiers in the Christmas Truce were told to be enemies and chose to be kind anyway. When is it hard to be kind?
  • Does kindness still count if no one says thank you — or does the thank-you matter too?

A new question every week.

Listen together in the app — short audio stories for kids 4–10, at bedtime, on the drive, in the drop-off line.

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