Dear Parents and Carers

I hope that you are all well.

Small Acts of Kindness
A while ago, pre-COVID, I led an assembly on Small Acts of Kindness as I wanted the children to understand the value of doing a small thing to make people feel better and how, sometimes, you may not even realise just how much these things have an impact on someone. We also talked about Mood Hoovers and 2%ers. This comes from the fantastic ‘Art of Being Brilliant’ book by Andy Cope. Andy has this to say about 2%ers:

‘We reckon only about 2% of people fall into the category of feeling consistently great. The “2%ers” stand out a mile. They are enthusiastic, optimistic, energetic, effervescent and possess a ‘can-do’ mentality. Research shows that they live longer, are more productive and raise the happiness levels of the people around them.’

Then you have the Mood Hoovers who can suck the positivity out of any situation and find something to complain about. He also explains that the 2%ers don’t have less bad luck than the Mood Hoovers, they just choose to look at life more positively. I try to put this into practice when I can. I am prone to get frustrated in traffic jams so I now make myself look around to appreciate the buildings and landscape that I would have missed. I know it sounds silly, but it does work!

Anyway, my reason for mentioning this is that in the last two weeks I have been lucky enough to be the recipient of some small acts of kindness. They have come at just the right time as I find this half term a challenge. The amount of work I need to get through can leave me feeling as though I’m drowning in To-Do lists.

Thankfully, when it was my birthday last week, Mr Marks gave me a lovely plant for my office and Mrs Matthewman gave me a brilliant Cold Tea water bottle. Both of these things have made my days better. Two days later, a parent stopped me on the playground to say how much they had enjoyed the new FS Parents’ Evening via Zoom and that her friends, who had children about to start school, also felt the same way. Then I read Mr Marks’ lovely comments in his last newsletter about how well the children behave at break and lunchtimes.

This week, Mr Marks and I were given a beautiful homemade Fathers' Day card from a child in Year 4 who called us the Fathers of the School – that’s a first and it made me smile. Then Mr Clifton, one of our Midday Supervisors came to find me to say how amazing our children are and how much he loves his job. The cherry on the cake came when a child in school who has benefited from the generosity of another family wrote them a thank-you card. In the card, he said that when he was older he was going to ‘pay forward’ this small act of kindness and do something for someone else. What an amazing school and world we would live in if we all made the time to be a bit kinder and to ‘pay it forward’ when someone has been kind to us.

My job has now been to find ways to pay it forward. I also need to acknowledge that I have felt like a bit of a Mood Hoover recently and will endeavour to be more of a 2%er. Thankfully, working in a primary school, full of the loveliest of children, makes this much easier to do. I am about to start planning next week’s assembly which is all about School Diversity week. What a great opportunity for me to remind the children to be kind to one another, to seek the positive in others and to praise difference and individuality.

 

Kind regards,

Mr Eardley

Head Teacher

 

^{Photo by Sergey Shmidt on Unsplash}