Character Education and Building a Better You at Spring Hill

Spring Hill's Vision Statement: A neighborhood school committed to fostering the growth of the whole child.

Spring Hill believes in its MISSION:

Modeling respect and integrity
Increasing environmental involvement
Safe learning atmosphere
Superior academic expectations
Instilling individual creativity
Open communication
Nurturing each child's gifts

Spring Hill Elementary School has a robust character education program that utilizes administration, staff, students, parents, and community volunteers to reinforce positive character qualities in our students. Our students in turn demonstrate this character through a variety of community service projects. The PTO co-chairs, Beth Eames, Kerry Monahan, and Tricia Markwood for Character Education/ Community Service together with each grade's team of teachers meet throughout the year to coordinate projects and tie them to the curriculum. The co-chairs also work with a parent from each class to streamline the logistics and implementation of each project. In this way, the children experience reinforcement of the grade's theme through a variety of messages.

The themes for each grade during this current school year are:

K- Thanking Our Community Helpers
1st- Uplifting Our Senior Citizens
2nd- Caring For Our School
3rd- Honoring Our Soldiers and Veterans
4th- Helping the Homeless
5th- Feeding the Hungry
6th- Supporting Those Affected by Illness or Trauma

A sampling of the first semester projects include: Thank you boxes to local fire stations, Thanksgiving placemats for Sunrise Assisted Living Home, collecting books to add to those purchased by donations at the Fall Book Fair for a needy school in Virginia, writing letters to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, making after school snack bags for homeless children in Reston, and creation of activity bags for children staying at the Ronald McDonald house. We are truly a school community dedicated to instilling a sense of responsibility for the local and global communities by study and discussion, as well as acts.

The classroom teachers and specialists use a multitude of ways to reinforce the building blocks of character education. Each teacher displays a poster illustrating the building blocks, uses language that consistently emphasizes them to students, and integrates them into the grade level curriculum via plays, literary material, and current event discussions. The specialists round out the children's exposure by using the character education language in their teaching and insisting on good sportsmanship. Spring Hill teaches by example, from the front office staff, to the teachers, to the support staff, to the bus drivers. We believe in character education.