Featured Grant

  BEEP teacher Alicia Osborne-Stackpole reported this month on her Idea Lab grant to build and utilize a mud kitchen with a water pump and painted stone fruits and vegetables with her students. Alicia requested funding for this project because of the growing body of literature indicating positive developmental impacts for preschoolers of outdoor, hands-on sensory learning. Alicia's students, by playing with the mud kitchen outdoors in nature, experienced physical, cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional growth during the course of the year. The BEF is so excited to be able to support project such as these, that enable educators to explore new [...]

Alison Kerr, a French teacher at Heath and Runkle, applied for and received a Brookline Education Foundation Collaborative Grant in 2022. She was one of 33 educators to attend the ACTFL Conference at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center that took place on November 18-20 of 2022. 29 of the 33 educators in attendance were classroom teachers representative of all eight Brookline K-8 schools and Brookline High School, covering all K-12 grades. Alison applied for the grant because it was a good opportunity for teachers to get to know each other and to work together. It was clear from Alison Kerr’s [...]

Alison Hansel, Pierce School Math Specialist, traveled to Seoul to study Korean! Earlier this month BEF board members were treated to a presentation by Alison Hansel about her experience of traveling to Seoul, Korea to study the Korean language with help from a BEF grant. Ms. Hansel, a math specialist at the Pierce School in Brookline, began studying Korean during the pandemic lockdown. Like many (if not all) educators, Ms. Hansel felt burnt out and exhausted after going through the subsequent remote and hybrid teaching challenges. She was looking for a means to reconnect with her work and renew her motivation, [...]