ICS Spirit Games

Each year at ICS the Elementary PE Department will run a Sports Day where all students K-5 spend the day playing loads of fun mini games at sports facility we rent out. This is always a highlight of the year for staff and students, but this year we as a department decided to take a different approach. We noticed that despite being awesome kids, many of our students had a very difficult time demonstrating good sportsmanship when competing and especially so at our sports day event. To try to help our students grow in this area we decided this year to re-brand our Sports Day event and promote it as ICS Spirit Games.

The previous year the idea of "The Spirit of the Game" was introduced to our elementary students based off the concept of Spirit Scores taken from Ultimate Frisbee competitions. This idea had already started to foster improvement in our students attitudes, but to further this we heavily promoted the concept during the week leading up to the event. For the 5 days leading up to our ICS Spirit Games we prepared mini-lessons for homeroom teachers that addressed each of the elements of The Spirit of the Game. We also made posters and put them around the school and created a teacher led dance and sing along promoting the Spirit of the Game that we performed for our whole Elementary in the theater.

When it came to the event it was a massive success. This was my first experience with the event at ICS and I didn't know first hand how students had acted in years past, but from everyone I talked to there was a significant shift in attitude from years past. This was super awesome to see and we as a department look forward to how it will continue to impact students' hearts in future years.