Give Your Hearts Out to Everybody

This book came out of a grassroots project to bring a classroom of children together as a team. As their K-8 school counselor and an Advanced Nurtured Heart Trainer, I rotate and teach character and personal safety lessons in all the classes, and thus I have the opportunity to know all the students fairly well. Many of the lessons taught work on naming what is going right and building capacity in kids to handle all the challenges of life.



In this grade, there was a bit of taunting, name calling and exclusion among some of the students, especially in regards to children who were “different.” Their teacher, Georgia Tilson, and I had some concerns about how some of the students were behaving and the impact of these choices on other students’ inner wealth and self-confidence. One of the targets was actually a talented artist who was also very bright. As he and I visited together, I suggested we create a tool to help other kids learn to be accepting and welcoming. All kids (in fact, all people) want to connect and belong. Some are just not quite as skilled at it yet.



Mrs. Tilson loved this idea, too. So as a class, we brainstormed all the tips and advice we could think of that would help students in our school get along. (It was a very long list!). Then the class voted on the best ones, combined similar ideas and worked in teams to illustrate pictures to match the “rules.” The title was also a student’s suggestion. The project took nearly six months as we worked together on it every other week.