This week, as a part of the SGA (The Student Government Association), we came together and decided to organize a virtual spirit week. Since the SGA this year (2019-2020) is about to have their new elections, the SGA EXCO members decided to have one last spirit week before new SGA members are elected. Since Anya and I are the SGA spirit coordinators last year, we both took initiative and ran this even together (with help and support from the rest of the SGA). I found the spirit week a really fun way to bring the whole school together to show some spirit. Since Halloween was coming up, we decided to keep the spirit week to the Halloween theme and come up with some fun activities and challenges for everyone to do each day of the spirit week. It only was 4 days long (because we had Friday off, for the Poya Day Celebration). We decided to include the whole school in this spirit week, and everyone participated from Pre-schoolers to Seniors and even teachers! As an SGA Team, we collaborated to make this happen, and Anya (the other Spirit Coordinator) we worked together, splitting the work to try to get everything done.

I found it challenging to come up with different ideas and ways to keep people engaged and interactive. This is because hardly anyone participated in the last spirit week, and I really wanted to get the whole community engaged and interacted. To overcome this challenge, I brainstormed different ways to make my padlets more interesting and engaging. To do this, I thought up of making the padlets Halloween themed, and I looked thoroughly through the internet to find some fun, house colored backgrounds. I figured that this would motivate kids to interact more and to remind people to engage, I also sent out reminder emails. I developed creativity skills doing this, as I came up with creative solutions to my challenge of having people not react. The fun (kid-friendly) backgrounds that I used, as well as each house padlet I set up, are below.

 

The 4 days of our spirit week were as follows:  Monday was Halloween Story Day, where everyone was encouraged to try to write a spooky story in less than 10 words. Tuesday was Halloween Decoration day, where everyone was artistic and created or set up cool Halloween Decorations. Wednesday was Halloween Kitchen Day, where people got creative and either baked cooked, or created fun Halloween drinks! Finally, Thursday was Halloween Dress-up day, where everyone wore their favourite Halloween costume or accessories.

Here is the poster I made to publicize for our event:

Virtual Spirit Week Poster – Chloe

Since school was on DLP (Distance Learning Program  – Online learning), due to COVID-19, we created some padlets for each of our school’s house colors with some fun Halloween Backgrounds, so everyone could share their spirit! Since I am in Yellow house, I posted for each day on that padlet to try and get us some points. Then at the end of each day, I would count the points for each house and email it to the whole school. The final House points were:

 

Unfortunately, yellow house did not win with the most points, but I loved seeing everyone’s fun spirit from all the houses, and it was nice to see so many people (especially primary kids) participating in this event.

Learning Outcomes

LO2 Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process A new challenge may be an unfamiliar experience or an extension of an existing one. The newly acquired or developed skills may be shown through experiences that the student has not previously undertaken or through increased expertise in an established area.

LO3 Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience Students can articulate the stages from conceiving an idea to executing a plan for a CAS experience or series of CAS experiences. This may be accomplished in collaboration with other participants. Students may show their knowledge and awareness by building on a previous experience, or by launching a new idea or process.

LO5 Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively Students are able to identify, demonstrate and critically discuss the benefits and challenges of collaboration gained through CAS experiences.