Ordinary Mary’s Extraordinary Deed: A School Lesson Plan

As part of our big day of sharing “ordinary kindness”, I’m excited to have my cousin Kristin guest posting on the blog. Kristin is a teacher, and read the book Ordinary Mary’s Extraordinary Deed to her class.  She also came up with a great lesson plan to go along with the story. – Courtney

Ordinary Mary’s Extraordinary Deed: A School Lesson Plan 

By: Kristin DeRose

I read Ordinary Mary’s Extraordinary Deed to my class of 5th grade students.  Teaching in an inner city school, I am often talking with my students about what it means to be a kind person.  Daily I find myself saying, “It’s a lot easier to be a nice person than a mean person,” and they typically roll their eyes at me.  Most of them don’t really understand why.  Why should I go out of my way to be a kind person?

That is why this book really appealed to me for my class.  I wanted to show them how good deeds come full circle.  Before reading the book, we discussed the idea of “paying it forward” and what it means to do so.  Then I read the book aloud to them and told them to brainstorm simple, good deeds they have done for others.  Then we used a circle chart to show how Mary’s simple yet kind deed set in motion a chain of generosity to others.  We made the chart go full circle to show how it returned back to Mary, proving that, “what goes around comes around.”

I then challenged my students to graph their own good deeds and chart how the generosity is returned.  The entitled their chart, “Ordinary (their name)’s Extraordinary Deed.”  It was really difficult for some of them to come up with one good deed that they’ve done for someone else.  

This form of writer’s block (or kindness block) brought about a new conversation amongst my class: Are we doing enough simple, good deeds on a daily basis?  Many of my students agreed that they could do a lot more and vowed to make a commitment to try harder to do good for others.