Welcome to ISP’s Summer of Kindness! Our goal is to work with our kids and other adults collaboratively to make our community better and focus on things that are bigger than ourselves. Our goal is to work together with our kids to make kind acts and a philanthropic spirit an epidemic. Each Monday this summer we will post an Act of Kindness for kids or for kids and adults combined. Throughout the week posts will also be made highlighting amazing charities, philanthropic kids and adults, and fun stuff that might put a smile on your face. The overall goal is for kind, good, selfless deeds to always take precedence cultivating happiness in all that we do.

Week 1: Kid Crusader Edition

Hosting a Hunger Heroes Play Date

Although we are early into summer break, every Mom at some point during the summer months hears, “Mom, I’m BORED!” We have the perfect solution for that statement: hosting a kindness play date and this one is to help organizations like “No Kid Hungry”.  It can be any organization that collects food for the hungry, we just happened to choose this one and color our day orange. Step 1:  Invite as many fun friends as possible to a play date at the park Step 2: Ask each child/parent to bring cans of food to donate to the organization Step 3: Have donation boxes set up or you can even have the kids decorate their donation box as part of the play date activity such as this one:

Step 4: Bring some fun snacks for the kids. We chose all things orange in the spirit of No Kid Hungry (oranges, orange juice, goldfish crackers, and orange cheese and crackers)

Step 5: Activities: We always like to host our events with  the “fun” as the headliner and the work as something that comes naturally with these events so the kids always associate being giving and philanthropic as a positive event and yearning for more. So, we made our play date into a “Hunger Heroes” theme. And what sort of hero doesn’t have a cape? We brought color-me capes for the kids to decorate and then run around the park in their hero gear.

The kids also decorated paper plates to donate with the food as their own special touch.

Step 6: Once the kids were finished we had used this printable and made stickers for them as a send-off from their morning of heroic kindness

Step 7: visit www.nokidhungry.org under “take action”. By state or by zip code you can locate a drop off station near you. As mentioned if one is not close you can always choose any organization to donate your donations from the food drive play date. We hope your summer is  off to a great start! See you next week for our week 2 challenge!