Kindness rules at the Rainbow Workshop and Learning Center in Freetown

FREETOWN — Kindness is an everyday thing at the Rainbow Workshop and Learning Center. But the center also makes time for a special celebration of National Kindness Week.

This year’s observance took place recently and the children at Rainbow were all in.

Director Elizabeth Lawton shared the good news about a “great week” in an email.

The center, she said, was “celebrating and continuing to expand and develop our Kindness skills here in the classroom. The core of our curriculum is built upon living and making choices that involve kindness, peace, tolerance and helping us all to be Peacemakers.”

Lawton went on to say that “as an early learning center, we work together with families to help develop these skills in our children. We help to foster a sense of community that extends beyond the walls of our classroom and brings the global community inside.

“Each month, as we honor and celebrate a different country, we do acts of kindness for that country. It may be as simple as sending a note or a card; it may be more involved as sponsoring a child from Uganda, working as a community to make shoes for the Sole Hope Project, (Which we made 100 pairs), we share a classroom exchange with a classroom in Japan and correspond, pen pal, and send artwork, letters, school supplies and more to this classroom.”

Lawton said the center and its students also collect for a local soup kitchen, the Senior Center, the military “and where as needed we may be asked to do so.”

Most recently, the collection has been done in tandem with the Tuesday Club of Assonet for a military group that will soon be deploying from Newport. The kids will be sending cards and notes along, as well.

“In our classroom, on a daily basis, the children’s behaviors and acts of kindness through their language, their choices ... are given a rainbow bead to place in their Kindness jars,” Lawton went on to say. “It is normal at this point for the children to recognize each other’s positive acts of kindness and use language that is positive and affirmative in letting their friends know.”

In addition, the center keeps a list that keeps on growing as children come up with words “to show kindness and the kind words that we use every day,” she said.

Said Lawton, “We have a peace pole and have helped to plant several peace poles in the community. We continue to be active in several peace organizations and have been recognized as a Peace filled Classroom.

“The words MAY PEACE PREVAIL ON EARTH are something we say every day and we also do a poem daily that begins, ‘I shall use my hands for peace, not pain ....’”