Character is Key Imagine Evening Rose Character Education

Overview

Opening the door….

What you will find inside…Character Traits of the month:

August/September: Imagine Shared Values of Integrity, Justice and Fun

October: Respect November: Citizenship December: Caring January/February: Fairness March: Trustworthiness April : Responsibility May: Imagine Shared Values: WE ARE IMAGINE

Character Counts Curriculum

Imagine School Evening Rose uses the Character Counts Curriculum and Imagine Shared Values to teach students the importance of good character.

Character lessons and other items pertaining to character can be found on the S-drive in the Character folder.

If you can not access the S-drive or need more information please email the character coach.

Car Chats…

Every month Ambassadors will hand out Car Chats our 2012 CEP award winning Promising Practice that encourages parents to discuss the monthly character trait with their students.

Character “treat” of the Month…

Homeroom teachers choose the student of the month based on the character trait each month. Theses students are recognized via the Character Corner Newsletter, a tasty treat (on the first Friday of the month) and a Student of the Month ribbon.

Bucket Fillers Being a Bucket Filler means “you treat everyone the way you wish to

be treated”. The program is based on the children’s book – Have you Filled a Bucket Today and ideas on how to implement it in your classroom can be found here:

http://bucketfillers101.com/ or on the S-drive.

If you need more information please email the Character Coach.

Each teacher K-8 must display their weekly Bucket filler outside their door with their student’s likeness.

Ambassadors will deliver certificates to homeroom classes on Monday mornings.

Service Learning Every homeroom is required to engage in a

service learning project during the school year.

What is Service Learning Service-Learning is a teaching and learning strategy that

integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.

It can involve a group of students, a classroom or an entire school. Students build character and become active participants as they work with others in their school and community to create service projects in areas such as education, public safety, and the environment.

What does service learning look like?

If students collect trash out of an urban streambed, they are providing a valued service to the community as volunteers. If school students collect trash from an urban streambed, analyze their findings to determine the possible sources of pollution, and share the results with residents of the neighborhood, they are engaging in service-learning.

Examples of Service Learning:

Elementary school students in Florida studied the consequences of natural disasters. The class designed a kit for families to use to collect their important papers in case of evacuation, which students distributed to community members.

Middle school students in Pennsylvania learned about the health consequences of poor nutrition and lack of exercise, and then brought their learning to life by conducting health fairs, creating a healthy cookbook, and opening a fruit and vegetable stand for the school and community.

Characteristics of service learning Authentic service-learning experiences, while almost endlessly diverse, have some

common characteristics (taken mostly from Eyler & Giles, Where's the Learning in Service-Learning?, 1999):

They are positive, meaningful and real to the participants.

They involve cooperative rather than competitive experiences and thus promote skills associated with teamwork and community involvement and citizenship.

They address complex problems in complex settings. They offer opportunities to engage in problem-solving by requiring participants to

gain knowledge of the specific context of their service-learning activity and community challenges. As a result, service-learning offers powerful opportunities to acquire the habits of critical thinking..

They promote deeper learning because the results are immediate and uncontrived. There are no "right answers" in the back of the book.

As a consequence of this immediacy of experience, service-learning is more likely to be personally meaningful to participants and to generate emotional consequences, to challenge values as well as ideas, and hence to support social, emotional and cognitive learning and development.

Service-Learning Core Components

Investigate : Teachers and students investigate the community problems that they might potentially address. Investigation typically involves some sort of research and mapping activity.

Plan: What, when and how do you plan to do your service learning project. How will you connect it to your curriculum/lesson plans.

Action/Steps to be taken: Implementing the service activity. How will you engage students to take the lead while identifying community needs?

Reflect: Activities that help students understand the service-learning experience and to think about its meaning and connection to them, their society, and what they have learned in school.

Share: The final experience when students, community participants and others publicly share what they have learned, celebrate the results of the service project, and look ahead to the future.

Performance Character

Character strengths such as effort, initiative, diligence, self-discipline, and perseverance constitute our capacity to work. These qualities make up what we could speak of as “performance character”; they enable us to achieve, given a supportive environment, our highest potential in any performance context. taken from the CEP’s white paper titled Performance Values: Why They Matter and What Schools Can Do to Foster Their Development1

10 Ways to foster a school’s Performance Character

1. Create a safe and supportive learning community.2. Create a culture of EXCELLENCE.3. Foster, in faculty and students, the importance of effort.4. Develop thinking dispositions or intellectual character in all stakeholders,

such as: open mindedness, curious, skeptical and the power of “seeking truth and understanding”.

5. Assign work that matters6. Be a role model of excellence.7. Encourage feedback and revision.8. Prepare students to make public presentations of their work.9. Use rubrics to help students take responsibility for their work.10. Encourage mastery learning: Mastery learning requires all students to

achieve a certain level of mastery of a given concept or skill.

“Mini” Character Lessons

Each morning during morning announcements a character “mini” lesson will be given. Most lessons will reflect upon the character trait of the month and will give examples on how students can incorporate the trait into their daily lives.

Example: “Our character trait is Imagine Shared values for the months of August and

September. What is shared values, you ask. Well it is simple. It is the core of what we believe and what we stand for as a school. Our shared values are Integrity, Justice and Fun or as many like to call it Jif! So how do you show Shared Values? Well it is quite simple: Treat people how you want to be treated. Have you heard that before…yes I think you have We will be discussing different ways to show our Shared values of Justice, Integrity and Fun throughout the next few weeks. Nevertheless, remember the easiest way is “Treating everyone the way you want to be treated”.

Perfect Attendance Drawing

Each month we will have an attendance drawing for Primary, Intermediate and Middle school students. This is to encourage students not to be late or absent during the month. They will receive a prize that will vary from month to month.

Character Counts Week

During the month of October we will celebrate the Character Counts traits for an entire week. Please see the ISER calendar for details.

Ambassadors2013 CEP Promising Practice winner: the ISER Ambassadors. Student leaders on campus who promote good character.

Character Mission statement: Imagine School Evening Rose (ISER) character mission is to help students become happy, successful, and productive citizens by aiding in the development of positive character traits. We seek to create a safe, disciplined, creative, and productive learning environment where academic and moral education are balanced.