We developed Flock Together to help our students grow a “habit of heart” and facilitate service opportunities right here at our school. Research shows that students who are civically engaged at a young age are likely to remain actively engaged in giving back to their communities as adults. We focus on the development of character building in our students and for them to have a voice and impact within our school, community, and world. We wanted our student body to take pride in our school and to work as a team to make it a better place for all students. This is an inclusive program for all fifth and sixth grade students who want to participate to have choices with how to lead and to serve in areas that they are most passionate about. We have a team of passionate teachers who are excited about developing student/servant leaders and take pride in making a difference each and every day at our school and within our community.
Ultimately our goal of Flock Together is to provide students service and leadership opportunities at school to make our school, community, and world a better place. We have four teams that students can choose to serve on.
- Service Team: This team focuses on serving others. We do action planning at the beginning of the year to see what the team is passionate about and help guide them throughout the year to make change happen. Every trimester we do one philanthropy: one for our school to make it a better place, one to help people in our community, and one on a global level. Our team speaks at school wide assemblies and also speaks to buddy classes to educate them about their purpose and why it is important. We also have student valets who help students in the morning and after school with getting out of the car and welcoming other students with a joyful heart.
- Green Team: Our teachers help guide this team by reducing the amount of recyclables and paper ending up in the landfill. This team collects all recyclables from the classrooms and around the campus. They teach the students about the importance of taking care of our planet and that it all starts right here with them! They built and maintain our organic garden at our school. We also now have compost bins where leaders collect scraps of food at recess and lunch, which are later used as fertilizer in our garden. These projects help students to learn about the efficiencies of systems and service through project based learning. As you can see the possibilities are endless!
- Spirit Team: At the beginning of the year this team brainstorms and votes on spirit day ideas. These leaders put a calendar together and are responsible for coordinating the spirit days at our school every month. We created buddy groups so that the students are responsible for going to all of the classrooms to educate the students and to get them excited about having school spirit and pride.
- Media Team: Both of our media specialists work together to facilitate this team. Our Reading Buddies read to primary students once a month and serve as role models to our younger students. We have students leaders who help our media techs with maintaining the library and computer lab and also with creating innovative projects that can branch out to the classrooms.