The world needs more kindness. One great way to remind your classroom, your family, and yourself to be kinder is to print and post a Random Acts of Kindness calendar. Then, make an effort every day to do at least one kind thing. If you have this as a goal each day, you may find yourself doing a LOT more kind things than just one.

This spreadsheet can be used to create a calendar for any month or year. You can also customize the list of ideas, sort them and filter them. You could even create a list of 1000 ideas and then display them randomly on each month. See the instructions below the download for how to use the calendar.

Random Acts of Kindness Calendar

for Excel and Google Sheets
Random Acts of Kindness Calendar Template

Download

⤓ Excel (.xlsx)
For: Excel 2010 or later

Description

We created this kindness calendar as a result of an Instagram challenge by @debtfreephoenix. The challenge was not to create a calendar - it was to do some act of kindness in November. But, we happened to be working on another calendar idea at the time and decided to put that on hold while we developed this one.

If you're on Instagram, view our Kindness Calendar post, give it a ❤, and follow totalSheets!

SHARE YOUR IDEAS! Have some ideas for acts of kindness that you'd like to see added to our calendar? Please share using our Acts of Kindness Survey (it's anonymous).

How to Use the Kindness Calendar

Step 1: Enter the Year and Month

Everything in the calendar worksheet is automated, so on the calendar worksheet, you only need to enter the year and month.

Step 2: Choose a Color Theme

In Excel, go to Page Layout > Themes > Colors and choose a new color scheme. Maybe green for December, blue for January, red for February, orange for the fall months, etc.

In Google Sheets, go to Format > Themes and choose one of their themes. You can also customize your own set of 6 colors to make your own color theme.

Step 3: Add Your Own Acts of Kindness

This is where the spreadsheet comes to life. In the ActsOfKindness worksheet, you can insert new rows to add your own ideas.

You can sort and filter by category.

You can also mark your favorites, then sort the list by the favorite column to put your favorites on top.

This wouldn't be a true "random" acts of kindness calendar if you couldn't randomize your list! So, sort the list by the RAND column to randomize the ideas.

The # column uses a very special formula to ignore filtered results, so don't edit the # column. In the Google Sheets version, when you insert new rows, you will need to copy formulas to fill in the new blank rows.

Step 4: Print and Pin

Whether you are printing for a classroom or just want to share a custom set of ideas, go ahead and print or grab a screenshot to share with your friends on social media. Just make sure to tag @totalSheets when you do that.

Random Acts of Kindness Resources

There are quite a few websites that provide ideas for random acts of kindness. Below are just a few:

  • TeachersPayTeachers.com - Provides a listing of calendars for sale that are designed specifically for the classroom.
  • RandomActsOfKindness.com - A collection of printable calendars fir a lot of great ideas.
  • ProudToBePrimary.com - In addition to one of the original kindness calendars, provides a lot of other resources and ideas for promoting kindness in the classroom.
  • NaturalBeachLiving.com - These and other calendars we found on pinterest were some that gave us the idea to use different font colors within the calendar. Fun!
  • Pinterest.com - This board is a great source of ideas for acts of kindness, including creative ways to display them in checklists and calendars.