Last night my husband and I spent our evening in our school's gym surrounded by 38 girls in grades 3-6 (yikes!). Two students in English 9 (Maaika and Jenna) chose to put on a free basketball clinic for girls in the grades mentioned above for their Social Action project.
Both of these girls are passionate about basketball. They've played for years, and as freshmen have seen their fair share of Varsity court time. Both of their parents are involved with coaching either youth leagues or high school basketball, so it was natural that their project involved basketball. They've been planning the clinic for several weeks. They had to get permission to use the facility, create a registration form and liability waiver, plan the schedule, promote the clinic, etc. As of yesterday afternoon they had only received five registration forms and they expected to have about 15 girls at the clinic. Nate and I walked into the gym about ten minutes after the clinic started to see 38 little girls dribbling basketballs in a big circle while Maaika and Jenna walked around correcting form and offering encouragement. These two girls are so quiet in my class, so it was awesome to see them in leadership roles being vocal. They were definitely in their element last night. The girls were super organized and even had snacks for the girls to eat halfway through the clinic. They made cute little gift bags to give out to each girl at the end of the clinic.
After talking to a few parents last night, I discovered that our community or school hasn't offered a basketball camp or clinic for girls in years...no wonder these girls came in droves! One parent last night thanked me for having this project for the kids (I had his oldest daughter in class last year) because "The kids are really learning the importance of public service."
I had so much fun watching my two students corral and lead nearly 40 energetic little girls last night. It gave me a renewed energy to get me through the last week of working on our projects. Here are some photos of the night:
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| Maaika (left) and Jenna (right) working up some last minute plans while the little girls eat snacks |
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| All the girls |
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| Jenna trying to corral the 3-4th graders |
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| Running dribbling drills |
1 comment:
That's awesome!
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