Katherine Cornthwaite's Grade 10 class went silent when she read aloud a small story about a garbage collector's kindness, from the newspaper.

Her class's focus on the story prompted a 20-minute discussion about acts of kindness. "I thought,`I can't leave this,'" she says.

She passed out red, yellow and green blank sticky notes and asked them to jot down their own kindnesses. "I told them if they filled my bulletin board, I'd give them a pizza party."

Last month, she anted up six pizzas and a student in the class provided the soft drinks.

(Read the story in the Toronto Star)