An elementary school class on Long Beach Island is leaving their mark across their small town of Beach Haven. The kids hope to put a smile on the community’s faces.

“My shell has a lot of color and some sparkles,” says first-grader Evie Ball.

The students at Beach Haven Elementary School are on a mission to spread kindness. They are painting seashells and placing them around the town and the beach.

“This shell was made with love by the first-grade students at Beach Haven School as part of our kindness project,” says teacher Jill Falletta.
Falletta says that the students collected 100 shells.

“The class worked on painting them and adding inspirational messages to them and then we took it one step further and put them around the community to spread the kindness to others,” she says.

“We’ve been putting them at Murphy’s Market and we put them close to the arcade and we were putting them at the library so people could find them,” says student Lola Meyrick.

The back of each shell asks whoever finds it to do an act of kindness and share it with the class.

“We’ve been getting lots of messages back from people where they have spread the shells around their community. They’ve done kind acts like buying a lunch for someone behind them in line,” says Falletta. “Someone wrote us that they helped fix somebody’s bicycle, all sorts of kind acts spread all around the community.”

Some of the shells even made their way to Disney World last week.

Falletta says that her goal for the project was to teach the children that a small act of kindness can really go a long way.

“Really change somebody’s day. Just something as simple as a seashell,” she says.