To end this school year, here is one of the events that happened during the 2021-2022 school year.
May 20th was a day where the entire school was off time table. Apparently, this day was supposed to “make up” for all school retreats being canceled due to COVID-19. There were a couple of activities throughout the day and one of the activities was organized by the high school student council (HSSC.) I am the secretary of the student council and in this article, I will be talking about what International Day is and the process that we went through to make this event happen.
The HSSC decided to organize an event called International Day for the last one and a half hours of the school day. The student council spent a few months planning the event to make it successful. There were a couple of reasons why the HSSC wanted to organize this event. Firstly, though the current HSSC members have only been a part of the HSSC for several months, we wanted to have a good first impression and also to create an appeal to the high school students that we are capable of making things happen. Another reason was that international day had always been an annual event at NIS. Every year, one day would be dedicated to appreciating the diversity of nationalities and cultures at NIS. However, for some reason, this tradition came to an end about a few months ago. The HSSC wanted to bring this back.
What was the event like?
The event itself consisted of 2 parts: The International Day Parade and the Dolphin Olympics. The parade was the main part of International Day. The high school students would first get into the respective countries that they wished to represent, and later, everyone would come together to interact with one another. Our MC of the event, Mr. Seavey, would introduce the countries and everyone came into one big group to do a wave (and other things :)) As mentioned before, this parade was held to recognize the diversity of nationalities and cultures within our community. The HSSC felt this event was especially important to bring back into our school because we are indeed an international school.
The second half of the period was when we did our Dolphin Olympics. We organized 4 different games: Spoon Balloon Relay, Scooter Relay, Dodgeball, and Tug of War. The teams were mixed up and there were all different kinds of people within a team. The reason why we decided to have the Olympics as a part of International Day was because we thought by putting people into different teams and having everyone work together would connect to the idea of people from different nationalities and cultures coming together and cooperating with each other.
Planning the event
What took the most time during this entire process of organizing the event was the planning. Everything had to be planned beforehand in order for the event to run smoothly: a detailed schedule of the event, an explanation of each of the activities that would take place during the event, and a clear understanding of where the equipment would be placed in the gym for the event. These are only some of the details that had to be sorted out. As the new HSSC, we tried to plan months before the event to be sure that everything would be prepared and completed in time. However, since it was our very first event, not everything went as imagined. There were quite a few factors that we forgot to think about and had to figure out on the day. The music and placement of different equipment in the gym were the main two things our team forgot to plan out beforehand and had to decide everything basically right before the event. I was especially nervous and was freaking out about almost everything because I really wanted our first event to go well.
I honestly thought the event was going to be a disaster, however, it actually was not as bad as I had imagined it would be. There were still so many things that we could have done better or differently but at the same time, the event was quite well organized.
HSSC’s future plans
The next event that the HSSC is currently planning for is Dolphin Fun Day (sports day) that will take place on the 13 of June. By reflecting back to intertanctional day and keeping in mind all of the different kinds of mistakes that we made, we hope to learn from them so that Dolphin Fun Day can turn out to be an amazing day for everyone.
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