Linked by kindness

Gosport is a rural Indiana town of 800. It has an elementary school with 150 students -- one room for each grade from pre-K through six. Students learn more than their A-B-Cs. For the past 15 years, the school has included a character education program. Students focus on a different character trait each month, which is woven into academic lessons. The February word-of-the-month was "empathy."

During February, students wrote their name and what good deed they had done on a half-inch wide strip of construction paper. The photo above, taken by Laura Lane for the Herald-Times in Bloomington, Indiana, shows the result. At the end of the month, each student brought his or her links of kindness to the playground where teachers stapled them all together. The chain was long, with 1,847 blue, green, pink, orange, yellow, purple and red links representing 1,847 acts of kindness. "I noticed that my mom was having a hard time with the baby, so I helped by feeding her all by myself," wrote a third grader. After completing the chain, students chanted "kindness matters."