Plant Seeds of Kindness in Your Students This Spring

Ahhh, spring is in the air. The skies are clearing, birds are chirping, and summer vacation is finally within reach—well, almost, anyway! Celebrate this inspiring season with students through fun, festive, cruelty-free activities that promote kindness to animals all year long:

April showers bring May flowers—and with those flowers come a few bugs, of course. Teach your students to respect all animals, including insects, by printing out copies of PETA Kids’ spring-themed word search for your class.

How to Complete Online

To pull the page into Paint, follow these simple steps:

• Save the file in Documents.
• Find the file in Documents, then right-click on it and open it in Word.
• Copy the image. (When you click on the screen, it automatically selects the entire image, so just press Ctrl+C.)
• Open Paint, then paste in the image. (Click anywhere on the screen and press Ctrl+V.)

While you’re at it, use TeachKind’s Insect Rescue Poster to show students, step by step, the safe and humane way to catch and release insects who have made their way indoors. Check out these inspiring high school students whose teacher assigned them to rescue insects as part of a lesson on ecosystems in their environmental science class.

With numerous environmental changes, lessons about the life cycle are a seasonal favorite. However, many well-meaning teachers order life-cycle kits that use live animals, like butterflies or frogs, without realizing that these animals suffer in these projects. Replace these cruel kits—some of which recommend freezing the animals after the project is done—with humane life-cycle resources. Make sure your school rejects cruel chick-hatching projects and adopts kind alternatives instead. Both The Exploratorium’s Traits of Life: Making More Life feature and Learning Resources’ Chick Life Cycle Exploration Set teach students about life cycles without harming animals.

Speaking of chickens, teach your elementary school students how individual, interesting, and intelligent these animals are with TeachKind’s “A Chicken’s Life” activity. The lesson includes a free, kid-friendly comic and corresponding printable worksheets that will help your class appreciate chickens and understand that neither they nor their eggs should be thought of as holiday props. For older elementary students, you can also use these inference task cards and main idea task cards to help them practice their reading comprehension skills while developing empathy for chickens.

If you work with middle or high school students, use the video Draw My Life: Hen’s Life in the Egg Industry, to teach them more about the lives of chickens exploited for their eggs. Then, put things into perspective by asking them to take out a standard piece of notebook paper and imagine that they are a chicken forced to live in a space the size of that sheet for their entire life. Mention that this is the reality for millions of birds crammed into small cages on today’s farms and used to lay eggs—including Easter eggs.

We often see adorable baby animals in the spring, but it’s important to remember that animals such as chicks and rabbits aren’t toys or teaching tools. Teaching students to understand this and respect others fosters a kinder, more thoughtful school community. After students decorate the coloring sheet, hang up their creations as a reminder that animals belong in their natural habitat with their friends and family, and that taking them away from their home is cruel.

Inspire students to be on the lookout for animals in their neighborhood who need help and empower them to be heroes to animals with TeachKind Rescue Stories reading comprehension worksheets.  These stories are perfect for spring:

• Pickles the Rabbit (for grades K–2)
• Florence the Cat Survives a Flood (for grades K–2)
• Herman the Duckling’s First Swim (for grades K–2)—includes a video
• Lucky [the Chicken] and the Good Samaritan Who Saved Her (for grades 6–8)—includes a video
• Songwriter and Student Save Lamb From Slaughter (for grades 9–12)
• Teens Save a Suffering Squirrel (for grades 9–12)

If you have gardening space available, now is the perfect time to grow some native plants and help children create and tend an animal-friendly garden where they can observe local wildlife. A great resource for purchasing seeds for plants native to your area is Prairie Moon Nursery, which takes away the guesswork by providing information about regional suitability and the necessary conditions for growing each type of seed available. You could also talk to children about the positive impact that native plants can have on wildlife in your area.

Ready for a little spring cleaning? Take the opportunity to teach students, in an age-appropriate way, how animals are used in painful experiments to test cleaning products and other items. Then, explain how they can identify cruelty-free products. Refer to this list when you need to do a little cleaning of your own!

As surely as spring brings daffodils and tulips, it also brings kittens—lots of them. Animal shelters everywhere brace themselves for what they call “kitten season.” Pregnant cats and litters of homeless kittens arrive in large numbers, and facilities scramble to accommodate them all. While kittens are adorable, the consequences of the homeless-animal crisis are far from cute. Use this free lesson plan to teach your students about this issue and ways they can help companion animals.