Our Heartwork program has become very special to both our students and teachers in just a few years. Heartwork is homework (or in-class work for kindergartners and first graders) that relates to thinking about what it means to be a good person. Projects have included:

• writing letters of thanks to local firefighters battling the 2009 Station Fires
• an art project in which students filled one half of a heart with images or text of things that are important to them and filled the other side with personal qualities that are important
• making a list of “Five Things I Pledge To Myself.” after an in-class reading of Maria Schriver’s book “Just Who Will You Be?,” which asks children to consider who they will be when they grow up, as opposed to what they will be
• selecting inspirational quotes, which you will see adorning the doors and walls of our Lower School buildings.

Heartwork, which started in the 2008-2009 school year, was inspired by five teachers’ attendance at the Seeds of Compassion Conference in Seattle, Washington, featuring the Dalai Lama. The goal of the conference was to focus on how empathy and compassion develop in the brain, and to create a consciousness for empathy and to determine a role for teaching empathy in schools. There, a simple remark by a panelist, who said “What children need is more heartwork, not more homework,” was the catalyst for this new program at Buckley. In 2008, Heartwork was launched in the fourth grade. Based on its instant embrace and powerful impact on students, by year-end the program had spread to grades 2-5 with Heartwork replacing homework one night a week. And last year, grades K & 1 developed an in-class version.

Click here to see samples of Heartwork assignments.

I've found that the most significant part of Heartwork is the conversations students have both with their parents at home and in class the next day,”

Fourth grade teacher Christina Cormack, who developed the program along with fourth grade teacher Michele McKenzie.