San Leandro, CA
Full-Circle Learning Early Childhood Center at Rancho Sespe
Tarzana, CA
FCL Alumni Club, Los Angeles, CA
Full-Circle Learning Academy, Los Angeles, CA
San Leandro, CA
Discovering by counting sugar in soda.
A hero learns to play guitar
Teaching the teachers is our primary means of supporting wide-scale change, so Full-Circle Learning mentored the teachers with concepts and contacts for service-learning projects and guest presenters to help students connect content knowledge, habits-of-heart and community service. Advocating a soda tax, publicly demonstrating the science of clean drinking water, thanking a doctor whose vision launched 40 farmers’ markets at local hospitals, and shopping and cooking for their own families were among the plans for the students. The Lift/Levitante staff carried out these projects and incorporated additional curriculum on the science and actions needed for diabetes awareness and prevention. Many of the young participants had never experienced a summer program, as they had never been offered free educational services such as these. They hope for continuing programs from one year to the next.
Hoola hoop physical activity
For more photos and student project details of this Habits of Heroes summer school, please also see the Lift/Levantate website.
Teacher's diabetes chart, filled in by kids
Dr.Maring cooking demo at the Kaiser farmers market
Full-Circle Learning Early Childhood Center at Rancho Sespe
Rancho Sespe Summer School Newsletter 2016
Excerpt from the Newsletter: As usual, the PEACEMAKERS are overly excited to come into class and see friends they have seen throughout the year as well as meeting new ones. Together the class came up with another word to define aspiration and that was to DREAM.
Click to View the PDFPreschoolers learn patience by planting seeds and waiting for them to grow in the 2015-16 school year.
Piru, CA - Sugey Lopez teaches students about the relationship between human nature, nature and the arts as she teaches the habits-of-heart.
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These young children learn to associate learning with service from their earliest memory. They enter kindergarten ready to read, to think, problem solve and to interact with others in collaborative, compassionate ways. Teachers at the local school now recommend the program to parents.
One little "elf" learning the Habits of Givers smiles at the camera during the holiday parade in Piru California, 2010. The Full-Circle Learning Preschool float won first place for their group participation. Parent involvement is a key to the success of the school. Parent fundraisers ensure that service learning field trips as well as cultural celebrations, take place for children in this hamlet, which sits amid the hills in the heart of the citrus fields and farms of Ventura County.Now the program quickly fills up each fall, and a waiting list often collects by midyear. In 2009, the graduation had to move to the grounds of the nearby church for lack of space. State grants are still lean, but the project has attracted attention as a successful FirstFive program and is one of the few still growing in a state where the recession has meant slashed budgets for many. Parent involvement now augments teachers’ efforts and helps the students in many ways. Children and parents and teachers all help to make the Piru Preschool thrive.
2015 Brings Habits of Oneness to Rancho Sespe
Rancho Sespe’s Ambassadors, Rebuilders and Peacemakers made an impact on their community this year as their Habits of Oneness theme came to life. Practicing the habit of teamwork, they designed wastewater irrigation gardens, role-played the teamwork needed for disaster relief, and honored California firefighters engaged in teamwork to address the current crises.
Next they studied the habit of leadership, identifying its aspects in historical figures and the effects it has in bringing a community together in practical ways. They learned about transportation and related careers, with the little ones (Peacemakers) creating a map from their own village to the beach. A visit to the depot and historical museum helped them honor docents who commemorate leadership skills that shape history.
Their last habit-of-heart, awareness, included community awareness projects and new awareness of the ways in which humans rely on the ocean and its coral reefs. The unit culminated in a beach clean-up to reduce oceanic pollution. The season ended with mastery ceremony, allowing students to not only strive to master their own habits-of-heart but to surprise their parents by celebrating their parents’ mastery of a particular habit-of-heart.
Ambassadors present gifts of art to fire department, who offer demonstrations in firefighting in return.
Ambassadors present gifts of art to fire department, who offer demonstrations in firefighting in return.
Students stop to pose while tabulating the types of pollution found on a beach.
Student-made exhibits help teach the community.
Student-made exhibits help teach the community.
Student-made exhibits help teach the community.
A student recognizes positive habits in her parents.
A parent receives a mastery award from her child at the ceremony.
Fifty-four young people (ages 2 - 18) participated in the Full-Circle Learning program at Rancho Sespe in the summer of 2012. Their integrated education projects helped them practice Sacrifice, Consideration and Integrity and took them to honor local firemen, to present gifts of recycled art for an environmentally friendly museum and helped them identify the need for integrity in roles associated with community building on a tour of their city center. They even honored a student-turned-teacher for being willing to sacrifice life to safe another student. [[Click here to see highlights of this inspiring program].
2011 Updates
Braille Institute giftsIn the neighboring town, the Piru Full-Circle Learning preschool has a waiting list once again.
A birdhouse project included a birdhouse with a webcam to help the community track songbirds, using birds as the bellwether for clean air-- one of hundreds of integrated activities in the project-based Climate Change Agents program.
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Somehow, these details still do not capture the personal stories behind the summer school’s frenzy of activity. The students often thirst for immersion in principles that will ripple through their lives each day over the long hot summer and remind them to be strong throughout the year. The reason lies in the alternate choices they face outside their little hamlet.
A half mile away, just before the summer school began, 18 youth were stabbed at a birthday party where gang rivalries erupted. Two months prior, one of the gentlest youth in the summer school grieved the murder of his cousin due to gang violence.
Students in the Ambassadors’ class had the opportunity to examine the relationship between drinking, violence and empathizing with the whole human family instead of with just one group. They role played difficult choices that make it important to know and act on convictions when all the odds are against you. They learned to identify and stand up for their convictions. By the end of the summer, one girl spontaneously committed never to drink alcohol again. One boy learned to reach out to the least popular members of a peer group. Others decided to turn to lives of altruism as they reviewed new life goals. They acted on empathic convictions not only by pouring themselves into group causes, but by documenting their own metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.
The parallels between enhancing the higher nature of the individual and preserving nature itself echoed through this summer of growth, with some students making lifelong commitments they could not have made without the influence of kind and caring role models who guided them through the process.
Beyond the room dividers, their younger brothers and sisters learned songs and read books and applied their zeal to creative integrated learning projects, to prepare to honor those they would visit and to plan for wise life choices and service to the human family. At the end of the summer, a parade to hang the birdhouses that invite cleaner air for songbirds and humans brought everyone together in the community’s backyard. Everyone contributed to make their village a better place and their world a little larger and their hearts more expansive.
Tarzana, CA
February 2013
Children from Tarzana Elementary Habits-of-Heart Club sing about the pursuit of personal paths to service, on Gandhi's birthday, at the Mahatma Gandhi World Peace Memorial at Lake Shrine.
Students at Tarzana Elementary School speak 44 different languages. Some come as refugees from every corner of the globe. They settle in apartment buildings nearby, creating an economically challenged and diverse school community. The teacher in 2009 decided that unity would serve as an appropriate year-long theme.
Early in the year, students from Tarzana Elementary School’s Habits-of-Heart program visited a mock refugee camp sponsored by Doctors Without Borders. There, they learned empathy for students driven into camps because of conflict in their countries. They came to understand the resiliency needed by young people who must live in the camps, and they came to a new appreciation for the reason to resolve the conflicts that often create the need for refugee camps. Some students, immigrants themselves, shared their thoughts about the difficult adjustment to new life in a strange place.
Tarzana students took the top three prizes in the Fair Housing Bureau's poster contest, a 200 school invitational.
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This proved a test of mettle for preadolescents to put self-consciousness aside and address peers at a local hangout. By the end of the day, they felt good that they had reminded people of all ethnicities and ages of the importance of reaching out and finding common bonds.
The annual anonymous parent survey showed that at least three of every four students felt an increased motivation to learn, a greater ability to work as a team and an increased desire to serve and help others. (One parent wrote that the improvement in this area was unbelievable and checked off improvements in every category of development—the arts, academics and character development.) New adventures in service await in 2010.
FCL Alumni Club, Los Angeles, CA
Students gathered at one of their leadership weekends at Big Bear Lake. Weekend projects focus on topics such as Ethical Leadership or The Habit of Moderation. Sample activities included a study of the effects moderation on human and non-human communities. Alumni studied fire cycles, discussed climate change, then hiked and rowed to look for fire signs and the effects of the mountain pine beetle on forests. A book of essays, poems and art for their global partner ensued. (One student, living downtown, pondered the lives thrown away by substance abuse and the fact that this phenomenon never occurs in the animal kingdom.)
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Through their projects and communications, these elementary-aged children had helped a young girl in Indonesia break the gender barrier so her whole village of girls could attend school. They had conducted water treatment campaigns, regularly cleaned beaches and visited adopted grandparents and made daily lunches for homeless children. They had honored relief organizations and journalists who write about hunger. They had offered the county blueprints to make recommendations for environmentally sound public spaces. They delivered a quilt and proclamation to the World Bank after 9-11. They learned teamwork at a horse camp and traveled overnight to Yosemite National Park to honor both the indigenous people and the officials who share a commitment to conservation. They made solar cookers for co-scientists in Kenya and wrote letters about their convictions that inspired a local movement in Senegal. They sent hundreds of comforting cards to Children’s Hospital patients as well as to children in the refugee camps of Kosovo. What would they do as graduates? Some would form an alumni club.
Under the direction of artist John Paul Thornton, students created original artwork showing the relationship of peace and the environment. Some of their art was displayed at the Nobel Peace Prize Center the following summer. Young Douglas, Melissa Douglas, Kathy Rosales, Leila Middleton, Douglas Rosales and Enya Edwards displayed a polar bear featuring their templates.
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My Desire to Serve: Young Douglas
I am age 15. I feel inspired to become a pharmaceutical chemist and create cures that are affordable for everyone for big diseases like cancer. The way drugs and health care cost, now people who are rich can survive while everyone else suffers. I will do my best to change this so that everyone can be treated. This is a goal of mine because I feel we are all one family, the family of the human race.
As a Full-Circle Learning Alumni my youth has been rooted in serving others and making the world an environment for everyone to enjoy. In the Full-Circle Learning program itself we would do projects and put on shows to display universal connectedness and give to our global community as well. As an Alumni member we get to put our own ideas in action and make things more personal. I have learned to be moral and have taught others to do the same as well. In the summer of 2008, I volunteered to teach the ways of Full-Circle Learning in Lesotho, Africa. My goal was to inform the children of the small village I was teaching at about academic studies, conflict resolution, humanitarianism, and leadership skills. These basic foundations, although taught within a month, resulted better than most acts of an average public school. [Young instigated this trip before enrolling in high school. He has attended private middle and high schools, on scholarship, while serving in the Alumni Club and on many other activities.]
My Desire to Serve: Kathy Rosales
Students gathered at one of their leadership weekends at Big Bear Lake. Weekend projects focus on topics such as Ethical Leadership or The Habit of Moderation. Sample activities included a study of the effects moderation on human and non-human communities. Alumni studied fire cycles, discussed climate change, then hiked and rowed to look for fire signs and the effects of the mountain pine beetle on forests. A book of essays, poems and art for their global partner ensued. (One student, living downtown, pondered the lives thrown away by substance abuse and the fact that this phenomenon never occurs in the animal kingdom.)
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Dance sometimes motivates people to communicate and learn in ways that traditional learning cannot. In addition to my service, I have learned outside skills that have helped my leadership skills in a variety of ways. For example, I help to teach children different kinds of dance forms and styles. I have also begun to take college level classes that have helped enhance my academic skills.
The extent of my desire to serve is unimaginable, because I want to make a change in the world for the days that I am still here. There are other children that are unable to partake in the leisure activities that are available to me. By giving back, I will feel better about myself and about what I have done for the world. Helping others does not take away from my school activities and other hobbies. [Kathy was valedictorian at her middle school.]
My Desire to Serve: Enya Edwards
I am 15 years old and a member of the Human Family. I have been involved in many projects with my alumni group of Full Circle Learning. We have helped young kids in countries around the world such as Kenya , Panama, Java Indonesia, Lesotho and a few others and also in our local community. It is personally rewarding when I am able to change someone’s life in a positive way. Receiving a letter from a someone else saying that we’ve helped her to overcome a challenge, such as being the first girl to go to high school in her village or working towards being the first female doctor in her village makes me realize that what I’m doing is for a good cause. These are a few things that my alumni group and I have been able to accomplish in our many years of working as humanitarians.
Being a part of the Full Circle Learning alumni group has taught me to be aware of what’s going on around me and to appreciate and reach out a helping hand to everyone. I have also learned many different virtues that have helped me to be a better person, one being awareness. Through Full-Circle Learning I have become aware of what’s going around the world and ways that I can help less fortunate people. [In 2008, Enya went to Guyana , South America to “do more work as a humanitarian.”]
My Desire to Serve: Jade Romain
“I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.”-Edward Everett Hale.
I strongly believe doing every bit of good I can to make a change that will benefit our world. I have a remarkable desire to serve our world. In my future I will become an anesthesiologist and join the Peace Corps.
The average American has about thirty years longer on this Earth than an African does. Being a young adult who is a humanitarian and wants to become a physician, I know it is my duty to help my peers have a positive frame of mind about any situation thrown at them and talk to them about how we can all keep our bodies healthy and keep our soul in good spirits.
I have a very long history with a non-profit organization, Full Circle Learning. I have been involved with them since I was in second grade and now I am a senior in high school. The teachers have taught children, as well as me, so many virtues that will stick with us for the rest of our lives. Humility and integrity have been my two favorite habits-of-heart since I was seven years old. [Jade, an honors student, volunteers at Cedars Sinai Medical Hospital on weekdays and has traveled abroad to serve each summer.]
My Desire to Serve: Douglas Rosales
My name is Douglas Rosales and I am 16 years old. I have helped the community and the world since the age of 9. I have helped open a school in the Los Angeles area. This school was set up to help children have leadership skills and help resolve conflicts. This school also helps with arts, music and being a better humanitarian to the world. I am involved in the Full-Circle Alumni, which helped open the school. We also helped send a project to Norway where we addressed the issue of global warming. We use many habits-of-hearts to be better humanitarians to the world and to discover ways to contribute for the greater oneness of the human race.
I am also involved in an engineering Saturday school. This helps elementary and middle school students further their quest of knowledge; so they can have more opportunities in the real world. I am also a tap dancer, piano player, drum player, and violinist. In my travels, I plan to make a good impression on all the people I come into contact with and show them a good American citizen who cares. I plan to be a person who they could come to and talk to about life and become more of problem solver and experience a giver. [Douglas, an honors student, has been involved in a number of extracurricular programs and has completed college-level courses.]
My Desire to Serve: Melissa Douglas
I am a Full-Circle Learning Alumni. I am currently eighteen years old and a new high school graduate. As part of the Full Circle Learning Alumni Club, I am an aspiring artist with hopes of helping to teach children in Ethiopia. There is a summer school that I wish to attend and experience next year. I have always enjoyed helping children learn and have enjoyed learning about new countries in return. I believe that this will be a rewarding experience for all of us. While it has occurred to me that Ethiopia is filled with ideas and cultural traditions that are strikingly different and contrast with those of America, I feel that the change will be something that I can come to recognize and accept. I do expect a number of challenges upon my arrival, but that does not stop me from wanting to make a change in the life of a child. [Melissa, currently a freshman at Otis School of Design, serves as a volunteer art and Japanese tutor at the Full-Circle Learning Academy middle school in Los Angeles. Her artwork has been used in a children’s book used in Latin America and the US.]
After an art project with incoming middle school students, the alumni talked about their long-term vision of one generation mentoring the next. They hoped that as other students graduate from their various schools, they too will form alumni clubs and sustain the lasting bonds that can enrich a community through group service and a passion for altruism.
Full-Circle Learning Academy, Los Angeles, CA
Change Agents send respect challenge to Zambia
Full-Circle Learning Charter Schools
Several types of schools the world over use Full-Circle Learning. In America, the model is being piloted in charter schools as well as in public schools. Each grade level of the Full-Circle Learning Academies unites with another school somewhere in the world to address global challenges through a local lens.
Homeless Walk - Kids pose with portraits they made.As free public charter schools, the Los Angeles Full-Circle Learning Academies resulted from the requests of the alumni club families.
After seeing the positive impact the model left on their children, who had engaged in summer and after-school programs, parents requested a full-day, standards-based school that would serve other neighborhood children as fully as it had served their own. They galvanized older students and parents to petition for a new school.
As a result, a new non-profit organization was established to launch the first Full-Circle Learning Academy, in 2007. A new grade level was added to the school each year. Grades kindergarten through 8th now co-locates at Manhattan Place Elementary School in Los Angeles. The school address is 1850 West 96th Street, Room 41, Los Angeles, CA 90047. To reach the FCLA-LA Charter School, please call 323-755-5125.
After its opening year, the school made a 19% increase in its API score in 2009, achieving a score of 721. The school credits nurturing teachers who help students achieve self-mastery and incorporate standards-based skills into projects that create a meaningful purpose for learning.
Early projects of the school included an advocacy challenge from the Heroes Class in grades two-three. The students in the photo above addressed poverty by first learning art skills. They made portraits of homeless people to carry in a citywide march, to generate awareness of the needs of homeless people. Next, they created math bar charts about the causes of homelessness in their city. They talked about what they would do if they were the city council, and they wrote essays accordingly. They compiled the art, the charts and the written work were in a book. A copy of the book went to the mayor’s office and another copy was mailed to their global partner in Chennai, India, to challenge this school to also help the poor in their own community.
In return, the Nishanth Full-Circle Learning School in Chennai developed a project for “orphaned grandparents” centered around the theme of respect and sent an inspiring book in return. Art work, writings and pictures of the children kneeling before the elders and receiving their kisses made a deep impression on the Los Angeles students. They learned many ways to incorporate skills into projects that touch hearts and lives.
For more information about the charter schools, visit fcla-la.org or call 323-733-7792.
Middle school students
Habits of Heart globe mural
Givers singing
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