First Day @ Casey

We worked with the Casey students for the first day, and overall I feel like we got them interested in the after school program that we will be holding next week. I myself was able to participate with three groups of students, the first two with three kids and the last group with five. I bring this up for two reasons. One is that it became apparent quickly that the students require a constant interaction when involved in the participation process, or else become easily distracted from the task at hand. Additionally, the five person group became hard to control due to the more than double ratio of student to CU student in the group. There was also an issue with one of the students feeling out of place in the group, which brought about the challenge to encourage that particular student’s participation. However, I feel that all three of the groups are now prepared for Wednesday’s activities, and are able to start thinking about what aspects of Casey they most enjoy as well as design(in its most basic sense).

In the first group I feel that the major issue was breaking the barrier of “first time” instructing. It felt that as the day went along, it became a little more comfortable. The first set of students, while being strongly attracted to the exterior norms, such as the buildings features and the fields/sledding hill, also pointed out that they equally enjoyed the decorative artwork that fills the school. There was also an insight that I found intriguing, which was to bring the tile murals that line the walls inside Casey to the site at Platte. The idea behind this turned out to be two-fold, in that a part of Casey would come with the students to Platte. Upon returning to Casey after the rebuild, the site at Platte would be able to keep the murals/tile as a memorial and then allow for the new students at Casey to participate in filling the school with new artwork. In the second group, many of the same features were visited on our routine “opener” tour of the school grounds, which we preformed all three times. The rock feature seemed to be the most important aspect of the immediate outside area, which is one of the few spaces the students can go during recess and lunch. I found it very interesting that the students in group two enjoyed the front sign the most. The students had a uniform “pride” in their school, saying that they enjoyed seeing their school name and it made them happy to be apart of Casey. It was also pointed out that the sign has been used in the past to pay respect to members of Casey that have passed away. The final group of the day was more of a challenge to keep on track simply due to having more students to deal with, and only two CU students to instruct. However, through the challenges, I feel like we were able to get all three groups to participate in the activity, although some repetition occurred.

From the activity, I have come to believe that the students, at least from what my groups comprise of the student body, desire an outdoor area to be both socially and physically active. There was also a strong tie to the school sign out front of Casey, which could be important for the Platte site to allow the Casey students to keep their identity at a new place. The sledding hill is also heavily imbedded within the students lives, and should not be looked past in the upcoming activity, where the students can be encouraged to help design the landscape at the new Platte site. I feel this activity worked out nicely, and should transition accordingly with the proceeding activity on Wednesday.

-Ian Gregory