Here in America, things are so upside down that adults can learn from children once in awhile. The fifth-grade students from Mary Scroggs Elementary School are an example of this.

It started out in my teacher Susan Kenny's class. Mrs. Kenny asked the room parents for our class, Holly Wood and Melinda Abrams, to find a service project that we fifth graders could participate in. In the beginning of September, we began Pay it Forward.

Wood and Abrams surfed the Web in search of the perfect project. They came across a Web site titled "Pay It Forward." Upon reading the introduction, they knew that this was the right one. The next day, they came in during lunchtime to explain.

Here's the idea -- you do something nice for someone, something nice that requires your time, your effort or your money. After doing your kind thing, you request that the person you gave your kindness to return the favor by doing three more good deeds for other people. But there's a catch -- it never comes back to you.

It was simple enough, and yet here was an opportunity to help the entire world.

We put up a bulletin board outside the classroom. Whenever we did a "pay it forward" we wrote it down on a slip of paper, and stapled it to the bulletin board. We also started a charity called "Kash for Kindness." We were on the intercom, we made posters, and we even performed skits on Ribbit News (our school's news broadcast), trying to get the rest of the school involved in Kash for Kindness and Pay it Forward.

During the two months that we have been participating in Kash for Kindness, we made more than $600 to donate to families who couldn't afford a Thanksgiving dinner. We bought them gift cards from Food Lion and Wal-Mart.

"It was a great way to spread kindness throughout the world," said classmates of mine Kate Wood and Evy Coleman. "It was awesome to see people so happy."

Every Friday we count the Kash for Kindness money that the entire school had donated. We do small pay it forwards, like mowing the neighbor's lawn, or giving a small child a book. We also did bigger ones like serving food at the homeless shelter and donating money to charities. It made me happy to know that we had moved the hearts of even the kindergartners and achieved our goal of helping others.

Though it's great to get the school involved, it would be even better if we had an entire community doing Pay it Forwards. Therefore, it is my request that you, whoever is reading this, do three acts of kindness for other people to continue our chain, the chain that has changed the lives of me and every other student at Mary Scroggs, our chain of Pay it Forwards.

Leah Abrams is student council president at Mary Scroggs Elementary School.