Creativity Awards' Weekend

Awards' Weekend!!

Not the Oscars...

but, Destination Imagination's Greater Fort Worth Tournament 2009!

Six months of hard work, creativity, research, imagination...

among approx. 12 school districts and hundreds of kids. Nick's team won a very special award, The DaVinci Award

Let me start from the beginning by explaining what D.I. is from their own website, as well as how I got involved 3 years ago...

Imagine a clubhouse without doors, a recess with a purpose, a classroom on the stage... "This is Destination ImagiNation, where imagination becomes a reality. DI is a community-based, non-profit, volunteer-driven educational organization that teaches young people from kindergarten through university-level the critical and creative thinking skills needed for success in the 21st Century. DI works with more than 250,000 children and young adults in all 50 states and more than 40 countries each season. DI teaches the processes of Creative Problem Solving and teamwork."

quoted from http://www.idodi.org/

I Do DI (abbrev. name is DI)

This is an amazing program out there that you can do with schools, home-schools, community/church kids, anybody! The website has lots of wonderful information, even if you just want ideas to give your kids opportunities in the summer (or whenever they are bored) that are really fun and require some serious thinking and creativity. Search "Instant Challenge" on that website, or simply google it and you'll come up with a bunch of activities that you can do at home with materials that you already have on hand.

Here are the goals of this global organization:

Destination ImagiNation® seeks to be the world’s foremost non-profit membership organization dedicated to promoting three critical life skills among learners at all levels: Creativity, Teamwork, and Problem Solving.

These three life skills form the core of our organization’s value system. We strive to encourage, teach, and celebrate Creativity in our Global Community. We will develop programs that provide a positive and fun environment for participants to explore their own unlimited Creativity and to take Creative risks, and we will recognize outstanding Creativity in our programs and in our world. We will provide parents, educators, and others with tools for encouraging and developing Creativity in their children and in themselves. We will work to promote the value of Creativity in all facets of the community.

We believe that Teamwork is necessary for success in our world, and that people working as a Team can achieve extraordinary things. We will design programs that encourage students and adults to work productively as Teams , and we will recognize Team accomplishments. We will develop tools to assist parents, educators, and others in promoting the Teamwork value among our children. Both in our organization and in our programs, our Teams will embrace cooperation and mutual respect in all their activities.

We believe that our world requires successful Problem-Solving strategies, thus we will develop Problem-Solving skills among children and adults who participate in our programs. We will celebrate the Problem-Solving process and the accomplishments of our members and participants, and we will recognize those who demonstrate outstanding achievement in Problem-Solving. (from http://www.idodi.org/ with some editting for space sake)

This is my second year as a coach or manager of a D.I. team. I was Maddie's 4th/5th grade team manager two years ago and I knew nothing about D.I. but I knew it looked fascinating and rewarding for the kids. So I jumped in. Our team worked weekly from October to February 'meeting our challenge': doing teamwork activities, instant challenges (building something or impromptu skits), preparing costumes, props, devices/gadgets, skit lines, etc. The kids have to do all the work, by the way. The manager can only ask questions and help provide opportunities to learn about their topic/challenge; provide them with a sewing class, or a stage-make-up class, what can you make out of newspaper-class, and MUCH more!

It was so challenging for me, that I said I would not do it again; then we got to Tournament day (all day/evening event) and the energy was enormous; the positive compliments given by the appraisers, the crazy hats and shirts and pins; the creativity we saw and enjoyed in other skits; the excitement my team had for their own 8 minute skit about life inside a volcano...and the fabulous excitement in the air during the awards' ceremony, the slideshow of all the teams, the cheering, the real encouragement and acknowledgement given to the kids. I decided that night I would do it again...

TWO YEARS LATER~

I spent the last 6 months with Nick and my D.I. team of 4 boys helping them open up all their creative skills, teamwork skills, and research skills to meet this challenge: create a play that takes place in a HIDDEN place. Show us what goes on; make a simple machine to help the characters in your play solve a problem. Here is our team brainstorming in my living room:

In Destination ImagiNation, two- to seven-member teams focus on finding solutions to two separate types of Challenges: Team Challenges and Instant Challenges. Then they present their solutions to Appraisers in Tournament-style settings. By working together to develop solutions, participants push the limits of their imaginations to better themselves and best their competition.

Here is our first prop, or set piece, made by these three boys:

The boys chose "the sea floor" or "the seabed" as their HIDDEN place after much brainstorming on their part. Then we looked in books and picture encyclopedias for what kinds of things are on the bottom of the ocean floor. All of the boys had read books on the Titanic and 3 of the 4 had been to the Titanic museum in Branson, MO, so of course, the Titanic became a set-piece for the play. The boys had to tell me what colors, what materials they would need; the did all the cutting and taping and made this...

This shows the "simple machine" they made with help only in the drilling of the lever (on left) from one boy's father. This father has some experience in construction so I asked him to teach a Saturday morning class on Simple Machines (luckily the D.I. guidebook gave me a list of simple machines...did I know what they were??? a screw, a wedge, a lever, a pulley, an inclined plane). So this class taught the boys what each one was, the dad had hands' on work and they talked about how each machine could help make your life easier in specific ways. This is them right after their performance in front of a big audience and appraisers. I could not help them in any way with lines, nor with stage set-up. They had to put all their set pieces on (which included a "chasm" of black paper, 2 hermit crab "shells" or boxes for 2 boys who played hermit crabs, and a blanket to cover the simple machine/lever). Notice the Titanic has only 2 smoke stacks because one boy told me, "Hey, two of them came off when it went down; we need to take two of them off." We had put 4 on there after looking at photos pre-iceburg of the ship.

The boys did an amazing job!!! A few got nerves and forgot a line, but the others knew whose turn it was and helped their teammates. They wrote the entire thing themselves. It could be no longer than 7 minutes. Plot: Two hermit crabs and a sand crab discover oil in the seabed and realize they need to get away quickly. A slow starfish hears them and asks for help; the crabs say they will help but need to get something to help them cross a deep chasm to safety; the sand crab suggests going to the Titanic to get some possible supplies. The 3 crabs go and bring back a wooden lifeboat. They use their claws and tear it up, making a "sea lever to jump over the chasm" (a simple machine that was required to help the characters in the skit). The biggest crab sends everyone over with his jump onto the lever (like a teter-totter) and then throws (an imaginary) boulder onto the other side of the "sea lever" to send himself over to chasm. When they get there, they see a hydrothermal vent and decide to spend their lives there as there are minerals (all researched...) and possible new sea friends.

Oh, and these are three 2nd graders and one 1st grader, who happen to like research and could really remember the details they discovered. The judges were wowed and gave the boys very high marks in every category. We were so psyched!!!

Here we are waiting for that night's award's ceremony in a high school auditorium. There were about 45 teams of kids in Nick's age group (K-2).

They had that many teams or more of grades 3-5, then middle school 6-8, and then high school teams, which were not as many; but their skits & challenges were tough and amazingly met.

Oh, our matching shirts say our team name and on the back the boys' names and then these two requested phrases and looked like this:

The Ocean Really Rocks!

NICK Ocean Peeps

In Nick's level, D.I. Rising Stars, each team gets a medal. The boys loved hearing their team name called, "The Awesome Imaginers from Sendera Ranch Elementary!" (When I was Maddie's coach they only gave medals to 1st through 6th place and our team got a 6th place medal; there were about 13 teams in our division and it was our first year so we were thrilled!!)

Then they were called up again for Destination ImagiNation's most prestigious award (according to the paper I received explaining it) called the DaVinci award. This medal went to 3 teams of the 45 Rising Stars' Teams. We were SOOOO excited. I, of course, got choked up to tears, so happy and proud of their hardwork (and my patience!)

Explaining to the auditorium why our team got this award:

"This team used in-depth research and understanding of oceanography and marine biology to create a unique solution along with a clever and understandable storyline. They demonstrated outstanding creativity with the use of their simple machine."

Let me say that the hard work of the manager is the weekly DI practices/meetings where I am trying to keep 4 hyper, laughing boys focused on our objectives; the patience it took, the organization to plan the meetings, the Instant Challenges we did weekly, the coaching without directing...do you know how hard it is to coach, to guide, but not to direct? I couldn't tell them to talk louder when the rehearsed, to move this way or say it that way...that is a huge NO-NO in D.I. and it's called Interference. Parents could not help with costumes or props or ideas. It was all the boys and my fine (could be finer) art of questioning them in such a way as to get them to notice how they were talking, moving, dressing, designing, etc. It is so exhausting by the end that I know I'll take a year off and not coach again til Nick is in 4th grade. I have a parent to co-manage with me who is willing to do what I'm weak in: organizing, getting materials, doing the paperwork and checking D.I emails.

Anyway, the top teams (of the 3rd graders up through high school) go on to state tournament and then the top teams go to Global Tournament! How's that for impressive! I love to travel--I could handle that... this year the Globals are in Tennessee I think, so I'm not missing out on Germany or Costa Rica. :) That would be some major fundraising...

I know this a VERY lengthy entry; it is for Nick's benefit (our blog journal by slurp.com) and it did take up a nice chunk of my free time since last OCTOBER--so it deserves this attention. Now we are done, tournament was last Saturday and I slept most of Sunday afternoon and Monday morning. Whew.