The Girls on the Run (GOTR) season looked a little different this fall, but it was still filled with joyful experiences for the 2020 team. What is Girls on the Run? GOTR is a non-profit organization that teaches 3rd-6th grade girls empowering life lessons while training them to complete a running race. MICDS has a team every year, and the need to pivot to a virtual format did not stop us. And what a cheerful season it was!
For the past nine weeks, 3rd-5th grade Rams gathered together over Zoom twice a week for their hour-long Girls on the Run practice. For practice, their coaches would guide girls through an intentional lesson from the GOTR curriculum. Through active conversation and exercise activities, the girls learned about empathy, self-talk, balance, choosing friends, communication, and so much more. Each lesson was paired with journaling as well, where the girls recorded their takeaways and the theme from each day of practice. Then, after the meeting together on Zoom, girls were to set an exercise goal which they completed on their own time at home. For exercise, girls could run laps at home, have a dance party, engage in a sport, or rotate through a variety of other athletic exercises (jumping jacks, skipping, lunges, etc.).
Two culminating milestones were met at the end of the season which concluded on Thursday. First, the girls completed the “K Your Way.” Here, the “K” stands for “kilometer.” Since exercises were completed throughout the season at home, girls had the flexibility to jog whatever distance they were ready for at their own location and at their own pace. Below, you’ll find photos of their final culminating races that they did on their own, with a sibling, or with a parent/guardian running buddy.
Next, the girls learned about compromising when they decided on a Community Impact Project. This project is a challenge to positively impact the community as a team by choosing one way to give back. After exchanging a number of ideas of who to help and how to help them, the girls decided to give back to MICDS. To do this, they wrote encouraging messages in books that they then donated to the new Little Free Library on the MICDS campus. If you’re on campus any time soon, you should see the Little Free Library well-stocked with kind notes inside donated books from the Girls on the Run team. All are welcome to join in on this project by donating books with positive notes inside as well! The Little Free Library is located here.
Thursday brought the team together for one final practice where the team celebrated all they accomplished and learned this season. The girls shared what they are grateful for, participated in their favorite games from the season, watched a slideshow of the fall experience together (many of the same photos are included below), and did some final cheers as a team.
Some of the highlights shared by the girls were:
- Making new friends
- Completing the K Your Way
- Donating books to the Little Free Library
- Learning how to compromise
- Sharing about pets, stuffed animals, and special objects during a show-and-tell
- The Peel-the-Banana cheer
- The end-of-season slideshow
Thank you to all of the Girls on the Run teammates for giving their all to the GOTR season! A big thank you also goes to the GOTR coaches Ruth Rainey, Leanne Rohr, Sarah Keen, and Crystal D’Angelo. Thank you also to the parents and guardians who encouraged their girls and even ran with them as their running buddies during the season.
To conclude, we’ll leave you with the final cheer that every GOTR practice ends with: Girls on the Run is so much fun!