Leaf Week at Silver Creek High School was from the 8th to the12th of November. This event was held in the Silver Creek library and lasted a week. Leaf Week was an attempt, “To bring more students into the Silver Creek library and help remind people of their goals and motivations,” Silver Creek student Katie Bogdonova said. “By having a new question everyday, people could take a small part of their day to reflect on their goals and what keeps them going in order to help them throughout the day. Even though it is a quick activity, it was effective and brought the Silver Creek community closer together.”
“Leaf Week was organized by my SCLA team and I, as well as Ms. Fredo, Ms. Holtz, Ms. Adams, and Ms. Vigil.” Bogdonova stated. The junior SCLA team created leaf week to help students come back into the library and bring back a sense of community to Silver Creek after a long hard year of difficult circumstances due to COVID.
The concept of Leaf Week was to bring students back into the library and write their answer to a posted prompt, such as “what motivates you?” and “who inspires you?” There were five prompts over the course of the week.
Nick Roadrick, a junior at Silver Creek High School said, “My favorite prompt was ‘what motivates me.’”
Roadrick stated, “Leaf Week helped me take time out of my day to reflect on things I don’t normally spend time thinking about.” Among other students Roadrick reflects on these many prompts as he writes his answers on a colorful cut out of a leaf, which would go on to become part of beautiful decoration in the Silver Creek High School library.
The leaves that students wrote on for the entirety of leaf week are now strung together and hung up. Others can now view them in the library.
“I believe that this activity brought the community together by having students communicate with each other about these questions and sharing their goals and motivations with others.” Bogdonova says.
“Even though people filled out the leaves individually, people came together in the library and watched each other fill out the leaves which brought a sense of community into the library. Many people also came in with friends which gave them a quick, fun activity that also brought them closer.” Reflecting on little positive things in one’s life can help relieve stress, and in stressful times that’s very important.
Students following the completion of filling out their leaves would receive a piece of candy from the librarians. “Honestly I only participated in Leaf Week for the candy” said Ruby Birmingham, a junior at Silver Creek.
Each prompt gave students an opportunity to take time out of their day to think about things that they may not have thought about in a while, and take time to think about things other than their grades, their classes, and the stresses they might be going through daily. “It really just gave me time to think about life and what impacts me daily,” Roadrick says.
In the week leading up to Leaf Week, students Ellyana Patil, Madie McChesney, Lainey Chandler, and Katie Bogdonova prepared by “creating a plan of when we wanted to do this project which was the first week of November. We organized a station to be set up so people were able to see it when they first came in, and we also created posters to spread the word about our project.” Bogdonova says.
“This helped people understand when leaf week was happening and when they could come in. Like I said, we also stayed organized by using schedules and to-do lists in order to stay on top of everything.”
Overall, Leaf Week was a successful attempt at getting students to come back into the library and take time out of their day to participate in a school wide event. Even if it may have just been for candy. No matter how small the act of filling out a leaf may be, all leafs are needed to make a pile