After hearing the story, we talked about what it means to say "I'm sorry". We role played some different situations and practiced using a sincere voice to say "I'm sorry". We also discussed what we could do in these situations to help the other person whether we were saying "I'm sorry" to the other person for something we did accidentally or on purpose. We compared saying "I'm sorry" to putting a band-aid on a scrape. Although scrape is not instantly healed, it does make it better, but it would have been best if we had not gotten hurt at all.
Each of the students received a purple heart cut-out. We discussed some hurtful things that we sometimes hear such as, "I'm not inviting you to my birthday party", "You can't play with us", and "If you don't ________, then I am not your friend". Each time someone shared an example, we wadded the heart shape into a ball, then tried to flatten it again as we said, "I'm sorry". We observed that the heart did not look the same at the end of our lesson as it did at the beginning. Using a band-aid, we attached the poem,
Before you speak
Think and be smart
Its hard to fix
A wrinkled heart.
The students took the heart home as a reminder of the power of our words to hurt or help others.
Here is an article from Parent's magazine about teaching your child to say, "I'm sorry".