At the end of last year, we, as a faculty, did a comprehensive review of our PACK (Peers Acting with Care and Kindness) program. We decided that it needed to be updated. We looked at a variety of different options and held many discussions about what direction we wanted the program to go. Most importantly, we wanted to do what we thought would be in the best interests of our Timberwolves.
We developed our “Cornerstones of Student Behavior”. These are similar to the Cornerstones that guide our faculty, but geared toward our students and how we want them to represent our school. These Cornerstones can be found in the Pages area of this blog.
Each Cornerstone focuses on one area that we feel is important for our students to emulate. After developing these ideals, we started to think about the best way to instruct our Timberwolves and get the message across. Then it hit us. There is no better way for students to learn than from their peers. From this idea, the Peer Mentors program was born. We asked teachers to recommend i7th and 8th graders who they thought best represented these ideals and who they thought would be good mentors to our rising 6th grade Timberwolves. We then paired two or three 7th and 8th graders with 8-10 sixth graders. These Timberwolves went through several training sessions and then planned lessons around each of the Cornerstones.
Our first PACK day was last Thursday, October 17th, and our mentors did not disappoint. They created fabulous PowerPoints, activities and presentations for their 6th grade mentees. It was a wonderful example of our Timberwolves being leaders within our building.
We are looking for speakers for our January and February PACK days. If you know of someone who would be good for our students to hear speak about Making good decisions or Showing sensitivity to others, please let me know.