Educating the WHOLE Child

“Educating the whole child” is a mindset that permeates our approach to education at Brainerd Baptist School. We have numerous programs for our students that help differentiate our program from other schools in our area. These programs are designed to move away from the traditional subject-based approach (math, english, science, etc.) and educate the whole child. Examples of things that do this at BBS are the STEM lab, our gardening program, CAT days (curiosity, adventure, and thought), our foreign language approach, our house system, and many other things. Whenever I am touring new families for admission to our school, the first thing we see upon leaving my office is our nurse’s office. I tell those families that Mrs. Adams is more than a school nurse. While she does an amazing job of managing student health issues and concerns, she goes way beyond that. Over the last couple of years, Mrs. Adams has developed fun initiatives to help our students focus on creating healthy lifestyle choices. Some of the fun things our students have experienced are a campaign to “catch” them students eating vegetables during their lunch, a screen-time challenges, a hand-washing video competition, step challenges, as well as various other things.

Currently, our students are doing a water challenge for the month of October. We have spent time in chapel talking about the benefits of drinking more water. We have set an ambitious goal for our entire student body to consume 2,000 liters of water in the month of October. Students can earn water drops by finishing water bottles of water each day. This is a fun way to help our students develop the habit of drinking water early. Over the last two years we have installed 5 new water fountains equipped with bottle fillers to help our students in this endeavor. This also helps us be better stewards as students are encouraged to bring multi-use bottles to refill each day. Learning IS fun at BBS!