A Heart of Gratefulness

Our good friend, Ava Samson, who regularly contributes to My Doolally, did an awesome activity that practiced gratitude.  Here, she shares about how she went about the project and the lessons learned...

Do we live a life of gratitude? How come it’s so easy for us to rant, complain and whine about our lives more than to be thankful for it? We have a lot to be grateful for everyday yet we tend to focus and magnify the negative things more than we should. We have forgotten how to be grateful. We have forgotten how to hope, to be excited of what life could bring us everyday.

This Christmas season, I wanted my class and I to practice a life full of joy and gratefulness to God. To be thankful for what we already have. In order to do this, I decided to do a mini project that involved the parents and their kids. I called it A Season of Thanksgiving: 21 days of Gratitude. I chose to do this activity using a tree as an illustration. The kids will each bring home a fall leaf every week and cutout/write or draw in it what they are grateful for each week. As the weeks went by, we filled up ‘our tree of gratitude’ with more leaves until it really looked like a magnificent tree in bloom. The students became more and more excited each week as they see the tree growing. This made them take home more leaves and present more gratitude leaves to class the following week.

This exercise was a great practice for the kids, admittedly even for me. It served as a great example of showing us that we could all be thankful for something not just every week but for something everyday. It practices us to think about how much life has to offer if we just stop for awhile and focus on the things that God has already blessed our lives with. I believe that an attitude of gratitude can have a significant impact on building and transforming a society where we can define our lives not based on our success and failures but rather based on knowing that God blesses us with gifts everyday more than we can ever realize. It is this kind of attitude that makes life worthwhile. This is the kind of life that we should show our family, especially kids. A heart of gratefulness where we are able to experience God’s greatest gift of life because Jesus died for us so that we would be able to have a life filled with love, joy and peace.

                                     We started with a bare tree until it gradually bloomed.

 

 Some of the works of my students

I am grateful for God

I am grateful for my family

I am grateful for the world