Educating
the Head,
the Heart,
& the Hand

Brookside Elementary School is in its third year of implementing K-6 character education. Our slogan is "Good character is what you feel in your heart, what you think in your head, and what you do with your hands." These are some of the features of our character initiative:

• A focus on a monthly character attribute.We found it was important to start in September with responsibility; after that came respect, thankfulness, kindness, courtesy, self-control, tolerance, perseverance, citizenship, honesty, and cooperation.
  
  
• The integration of character education into every classroom in the form of class meetings, character journals, student council, cooperative learning, buddy classes, and use of children’s literature in the language arts and social studies curriculum.
  
  
• Staff development: sending different faculty each year to Cortland’s Summer Institute in Character Education.
  
  
• Release time for faculty. Every staff member has had 1/2 day in the fall and spring to meet colleagues to develop character education curricula.
  
  
• A visual culture that communicates and reinforces our character expectations.
  
  
• A Caring Calendar, written by our students and sent home to parents, offering daily suggestions on how to demonstrate the month’s virtue.
  
  
• The Character Corner, a monthly column written by our parent’s committee
  
  
• and published in our local newspaper, with ideas that families can use to foster that month’s character trait.
  
  
• Monthly assemblies in which students share what they have learned regarding the word of the month.
  
  
• The Character Minute, developed by staff and students and aired each Monday night on our ABC-TV affiliate’s 6:00p.m. Newscast.
  
  
• Bus buddies and trimester bus meetings of students who ride together, their bus driver, and two teachers.
  
  
• Community service that pairs each class with a local charity of their choice.
  
  
• PTA collaboration with our Fine Arts design team to provide artists and cultural programs that relate to our character themes.
  
  
• A character education steering group to design or select surveys to determine the extent to which our students understand and act upon our character attributes.
  
  
• Character education has given our school a common goal. It is not just a program – it’s who we are!

Contact Brookside Elementary School at (607) 669-4105, or write to 3849 Saddlemire Road, Binghamton, NY 13903. Reprinted with permission from The Fourth and Fifth Rs 3(2). P.O. Box 2000, Cortland, NY 13045.