• The Brookline Education Foundation @ PreK-8
• The Brookline Education Foundation @ BHS
• Exploration and Engagement, After School
• Professional Development Initiative
• Caldecott Honoree to Visit Brookline Schools
• 2007 “Win a Mini” Raffle

Brookline Kindergarteners Know What's for Lunch!

Devotion Kindergarten teacher Michelle Gorden and Driscoll School Principal Jim Parziale (former Elementary Science Curriculum Coordinator) want Brookline Kindergarteners to know how to make good food choices, right from the start of their Brookline school experiences. With funding from a Brookline Education Foundation grant, the two have developed a program that supports and expands on Brookline's successful “What's for Lunch” program. 

The launch of the project was a four-day intensive summer workshop for teachers and food service, medical, and nutrition staff members, who developed the program content and age-appropriate visual supports. Then, during the second week of October, Kindergarten students were given a lively daily introduction to nutrition and healthful eating and an orientation to their school cafeterias.

According to Gorden, “Children had the opportunity to taste various foods from each food group every day.” Students were encouraged to explore and earned stamps in “passports” for every food sampled. Finally, thanks to the Brookline Education Foundation, every Kindergarten student who participated in the program got to sample a healthy school lunch, free of charge.

Gorden reports that the program was very popular with students and parents alike. “One parent said her daughter ‘was really into this nutrition thing at home.’ It was great to hear that it carried over from school to home.”

The Kindergarten Nutrition Initiative grant was funded by the Brookline Education Foundation’s Jack and Jordan Trust Litchman Fund, established by Laura Trust and Alan Litchman in memory of two of their children. The grant also is made possible in part by The Trust Family Foundation. This New Hampshire-based foundation funds projects in the arts, education, Jewish philanthropies, and medical technology within New England.

Preparing 7th and 8th Graders for High School Historical Writing

Geoff Tegnell, Brookline’s Elementary Social Studies Coordinator, saw a need:  7th and 8th graders would benefit from better preparation before taking on the challenges of Brookline High School's Social Studies writing assignments. A recent Brookline Education Foundation collaborative grant is helping to address that need by bringing together Social Studies educators at the 7/8 and high school levels to spend time learning about best practices for teaching historical research and writing. "Our target," says Tegnell, "is a 7th/8th grade teacher’s manual for writing argumentative essays."

Tegnell explains his vision for writing instruction in 7th and 8th grade Social Studies classrooms: "People have different strategies and use different language when teaching students how to write. We need more common language between elementary school and high school."

Roger Grande BHS Social Studies teacher and enthusiastic participant in the Historical Writing Guidelines grant activities, says, "I feel that writing an argumentative essay is a complex activity. We have the chance [through this grant] to explore it more, to be more discerning, and to identify the components in teaching for successful writing."

An important part of the collaborative group's work will be to read and evaluate 7th/8th grade historical writing assignments over the course of two years, in order to assess the impact of the pilot historical writing guidelines on quality and student grades. The best outcome, according to Tegnell, would be higher achievement for all students. "We want to help the kids connect to history in a personal way, to give them opportunities to construct ideas about history themselves. An essay is essentially putting together an interpretation of history.

As Steps to Success (STS), Brookline's comprehensive achievement program for low-income students, puts it in its Fall 2006 newsletter, "Learning happens . . . and not just between 8:00 and 2:00 every day." The academic support provided by STS includes after school enrichment programs for grades 4 through 8.

Thanks to a recent Brookline Education Foundation grant, STS educators had the opportunity this summer to research and launch several exciting new after school opportunities. Program teachers investigated on-line resources and studied programs in other school districts. In addition, two STS educators attended the national 21st Century Community Learning Center Summer Institute. According to Steps to Success Director Janet Selcer, the Institute was "chock full of new and model projects, which inspired us to pursue ideas we had always wanted to teach but had no time to develop." 

The results for STS students this year? Seventh and eighth graders at Lincoln School are "geocaching"-- a popular international game that uses Global Positioning Systems to help kids find "caches," hide some of their own, and learn about the history of navigation. After school students at Devotion School have taken on a “RoboLab” challenge to build an all-terrain robotic wheelchair. And at Pierce School, fifth and sixth graders are building a wooden bin for dozens of worms they are feeding through composting food scraps, in order to grow Mother's Day plants in student-tested, worm-enriched soil. 

As Janet Selcer says, "The heart of these programs is to foster exploration and engagement in learning . . . [and] really good after school programming must be fun." The Brookline Education Foundation Grant, according to Selcer, provided "a major boost for Steps to Success after school programs by giving us the time and direction to explore -- the same thing we want for our students." From geocaching to robots to worms, the Foundation grant also delivered more than a little fun, to Brookline teachers and students alike.

Brookline math administrators, specialists, and teachers are focusing on several areas of critical importance in mathematics instruction for Kindergarten through grade 5, thanks to an $18,000 professional development initiative funded by the Brookline Education Foundation.

To kick off the project, four Brookline elementary math specialists attended an Assessing Math Concepts Institute this summer in order to enrich their understanding of how to make individual assessments of students via oral evaluations, rather than by the more usual cookie-cutter tests. The teachers learned not only how to identify what a student can or can't do, but also how to see the stumbling blocks for each individual student. And they are now helping to train other Brookline math specialists in the use of these individual assessments.

A different cohort of nine teachers recently has completed a graduate-level course in "Developing Mathematical Ideas." These educators are already reporting an exciting leap in students' understanding of place value in their own classrooms.

In a third prong, Elementary Math Coordinator Angela Allen, Town-Wide Math Specialist Tara Washburn, and all six grade-level Math Facilitators will attend the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics meeting in Atlanta this March. Participants will attend sessions on coaching teachers and assessing students, and again will share their learning with math specialists in all Brookline elementary schools on their return.

Four math specialists plus nine teachers plus one Math Coordinator plus one Town-Wide Math Specialist plus six Math Facilitators add up to . . . lots of exciting straight-to-the-classroom professional math development in Brookline!

The BEF’s Todd Saker Fund will sponsor a visit by Caldecott Honoree Christopher Bing to all Brookline elementary schools during the week of January 8th.  A 1983 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Bing is an award-winning editorial and children’s book illustrator who lives in Lexington. Bing’s visit to the schools will focus on his political cartoons and his illustrations of the children’s books Casey at Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888 and The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,

With only 600 tickets available at $100 each, here is what you could win in Brookline Education Foundation’s 2007 Raffle:

• 1st Prize:            2007 Herb Chambers Mini Cooper or $12,000

• 2nd Prize:            Apple iBook computer

• 3rd Prizes:            1 of 3 Apple iPods

Why not take a chance and support Brookline schools at the same time?

Tickets are sold at the following Brookline locations during regular business hours:

Audy’s Mobil stations                        345 Boylston Street & 198 Harvard Street

Brookline Booksmith                        279 Harvard Street

The Children’s Bookshop            237 Washington Street

Connelly Hardware                        706 Washington Street

Elite Hair Studio                        185 Grove Street (Putterham Circle)

Wild Goose Chase                        1431 Beacon Street

In addition, tickets may be purchased at Herb Chambers Mini Dealership, 1168 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston.