Classroom Gratitude

I have just completed the 28 days of gratitude challenge. It has changed my life, the way I think, the way I look, the way I interact with others but most of all the way I feel. It is from the book The Magic by Rhonda Byrnes and I highly recommend that everyone does this. You will literally see the world through different eyes and so will others. When you are grateful for things you realise how much abundance you have in your life and how great you can feel. As I shared my experience with others and told others why I was grateful for them I started to notice the genuine smiles that came to their faces and ultimately the gratitude that came back to me and how this made me feel.

I want to share this news with the whole world, I want to teach everyone that they can experience pure joy by simply changing their thoughts. I was feeling a little frustrated as I did not know how to go about this. But as I am very aware of the law of attraction I knew frustration was not a feeling that would positively serve me. So I just started to talk to my friends about the positive benefits of feeling and showing gratitude.

I actually started looking at my job differently. I realised that as a primary school teacher I had a captive audience. I had the opportunity to teach this year 3 class about gratitude, although I knew time restraints were going to be an issue. So I decided to make one simple change to my day. In the morning instead of taking the roll and marking names off without even interacting with the kids I realised that this is the perfect opportunity to connect with every child in my class to start the day. So now when I take the roll I choose to say the child’s name and when they look at me (It’s important to make eye contact if possible) I repeat their name and say something nice to them. I am in week 5 of doing this now and it feels very different in my class.

I use the same saying for a week and it’s is so lovely now when I open the door in the morning the children can’t wait to say something nice to me. Some things I have said include “I am so grateful you are here today”, ” Thank you for coming today”, “I am so glad you are in my class” “You make my day a little brighter”. The kids faces light up with joy which makes me feel great.

I started out doing this to simply teach these little people in my care about gratitude and hopefully some of them will remember this at some point in their life but I was not prepared for how it has changed the behaviour in my class for the better nor was I prepared for how much I would enjoy the feeling when they show me gratitude.

I am so grateful to have found the 28 day gratitude challenge it has changed how I live and hopefully as I am teaching others about it, friends, family and students, it will change how they live. Focusing on positive things helps us to live the life we were put on this earth for. A happy and joyous one!