Gratitude Project Activity: Reframing
I have had the pleasure to work alongside Emi Bojtar. With her love for mindfulness and learning beyond academics, we set out together on this Gratitude Project journey. One day, we were taken by the negativity of some students towards the many basic things in life they had; this became the inspiration for one of our gratitude activities.
Emi put together a slide presentation entitled, “How to be grateful for the things that bug us”. What followed were a number of slides comprised of an image and a reframing question such as:
I’ll be honest, it took the students a while to get started. We were just about to change tack when one student hesitantly put up her hand and asked, “If we have crumbs on the table or floor, doesn’t that mean we were fortunate enough to have food to eat?” And from there, it took off. Slide after slide the kids talked, shared and compared their reasons for seeing something positive in a daily chore or event.
As a follow up homework assignment, students were asked to create their own slide in a similar style. When all of the slides were in, we had a fun “go around” of each other’s slides, writing a comment on each slide about what to be grateful for given the situation on the slide. It was lovely to see the kids beginning to look beyond what bothered them personally to wow, this might mean something else if I look at it a little bit differently.
This was an easy and effective activity for kids. Not only did it allow for concrete practice in reframing based on their own daily lives, it also provided an opportunity for a home-school connection and the possibility of seeing the impact of this reframing in real time. I never asked parents if they saw their kids responding more positively to situations they didn’t like or didn’t want to do (like chores!) but I will make a point to next time.
