The current pedagogy in creating a positive school climate is building personal relationships with students. Teachers and students work together to create a safe environment where students engage in the academic pursuit of knowledge. Service-learning projects that create this close bond and offer a collective pursuit of helping others give students a greater sense of confidence and self-respect as they explore topics that have meaning for them. An added benefit is that when students return home excited about what they were doing in school, the parents are pulled into the dialog. This author, along with her colleagues, decided to come up with a continuum for service learning where they would concentrate on three themes: community, water, and agriculture. For students, this meant exploring the themes at the K-2 level and then with new perspective at the 3-5 level. In this model they would have monthly lessons that intertwine with the theme, their current grade level curriculum and a schoolwide service learning project. They would keep all that was working with their county-driven character trait displays and activities, but the displays would also incorporate their yearly theme. They also introduced another layer with a schoolwide activity where multi-age levels would be able to participate together in learning. Through this project they were able to answer the basic questions that teachers ask to create lasting, positive relationships with students. Lessons were created to tie student thinking to the character objectives they had defined as respect, empathy and responsibility to others.