October came and quickly went this year, and we sure had a lot to show for it here at Belle Fourche School District’s South Park Elementary School to raise some spirits and strengthen our classroom and school communities through fun collaborations and celebrations! Click HERE to see our South Park Falloween collage video to show just what all we accomplished this very festive month!
Our festive month started off on October 5th from 5PM-6PM with a Pumpkin Painting event open to Belle Fourche families to enjoy a variety of pumpkin painting activities! This Pumpkin Painting event held various stations that included donated spooky sweets, along with mini pumpkin painting, pumpkin pan painting, and wood pumpkin painting! This event was made possible with the volunteers of Belle Fourche Elementary staff and Belle Fourche PTO and was such an exciting way to start off the month to get everyone into the Falloween spirit!
Next on our agenda was our Unity Day on October 18th during the school day! Staff and students wore orange in honor of National Bullying Prevention month, a time that promotes joining together to create healthier communities and environments through kindness, acceptance of difference, and inclusion. To help celebrate this important awareness event, Belle Fourche High School students collaborated with us, but visiting South Park Elementary classrooms to read a very fitting fall story of “The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin” – which is a great story of teaching the importance of inclusion and discovering and celebrating the things that make us different are the things that make us special! High school volunteers then spent time with our South Park Broncs further teaching these important skills through hands-on group activities! What a special opportunity it was to bring some of our older and younger broncs together to connect and collaborate in meaningful ways!
Our third and biggest event occurred on October 31st during the school day – Falloween! This was an exciting day that involved a costume parade for all the South Park grades to come together and enjoy celebrations together! The rest of the day incorporated classroom parties, fall and Halloween-themed classroom activities, and a collaborative event yet again with our amazing High School Broncs: the passing out of boobags that they helped put together, full of delicious, fun goodies for elementary students to bring home with them!
We thank our High School Broncs for helping spread cheer through their boobags, and for our Elementary staff for making this such a special day for their students through dressing up in costume along with the students, and planning lots of classroom activities for students to get into the spirit of fall celebrations!
To go along with our Falloween event, Mrs. Pruitt and Mr. Dunavant’s South Park classrooms got to display a huge collaborative project during our Falloween celebration day on the 31st that they have been working on since September: Their Global Monster Project! Their monster named Haunter Timothy Goober got to help monitor the halls while students went about their day on Falloween on October 31st, all while inspiring students to truly get into the Falloween spirit with his intricate guise and glowing eyes!
Mr. Dunavant's class and Mrs. Pruitt's classes participated for the first-time last year in the Global Monster Project. The project has been going on since the year 2000 and has expanded over the years. Classes from all over the world sign up to write a description of one part of the monster, and then those descriptions are posted, and each class uses that description to build their monster. This year our two elementary Bronc classes got to write the description for the tail and the favorite book!
Last year Mrs. Pruitt & Mr. Dunavant’s classes created a 2D to start things off, but now they are back with more knowledge, skills, and inspiration, this year they jumped in and made it 3D! The two classes spent a week creating the description for their monster in September, and then began construction the first week of October. The two classes finished Haunter Timothy Goober just in time for our Falloween celebrations! The students worked together in whole groups and small groups to decide how to create the parts, voting on things along the way to make their decisions. They learned about measurement and construction techniques, as well as creativity when making art! Mrs. Pruitt & Mr. Dunavant’s classes are now looking forward to in November learning about geography and learning about where each part of their monster collaboration came from, and soon will be writing the stories to go in their Favorite Book project!
We thank all the families, staff, school committees, and students that all came together to make this a tremendously fun, festive, and memorable October for our Bronc nation! Belle Fourche School District looks forward to seeing what all our staff, students, committees, and collaborative community events come to together to bring some more cheer and community collaboration for the month in November and onward at all of our schools in the district!