Playworks: Day 2

Tuesday the 20^th

The second day of our journey was by far the most exhausting. We began the day very early again at 7am and this time went directly to our elementary schools. The OG’s met back up with Coach Roo and began to jump into classes and recess time. Coach Roo is a 22 year old woman who recently graduated from the University of Colorado, a Denver native. She is being a PC for Playworks in between her graduation from the University of Colorado and her beginning of Medical School. She is extremely energetic, silly, and passionate about what she does. She expressed a lot of concerns to us throughout the week, but her positivity about Playworks and the work she does at Whittier overpowers all of the questions and doubts. Playworks is an organization that holds different roles at different elementary schools. At Whittier, Playworks classes serves as their gym time for the week. Each grade gets one 40 minute class per week, along with an hour recess every day. While I love the mission of Playworks, I definitely do not feel that it has enough sustenance to serve as both Playworks and gym time of the week. Of course, many schools are not able to afford the salary of a full time gym teacher and are forced to resort to Playworks. In this instance, I think that Playworks is better than nothing. It is hard to imagine a school day without gym time, as during my elementary days, I had gym every single day. Alas, the school day must go on. Coach Roo held classes for the 5^th graders and it turns out that they are in much better shape than I. Its unclear if this is because of their childlike energy, but I found them running circles around me the whole class period. The OG’s were in charge of pumping our teams up and making sure that they were excited as we were to play these games. Our day ended at 2 oclock as the seven of us took a short nap before heading to our first volleyball games. Outside of the school day, Playworks holds leagues for sports. Having already done a basketball team, it was now time for volleyball. Any students were able to join the team, but Roo had some frustrations. While 30 children originally signed up for the volleyball league, upon hearing that the games will be held 30 minutes away, all but 12 dropped. Many families did not have any sort of transportation to be able to get to the games and as a result were not able to participate. This was super disheartening to hear and made me wish that the school could provide a bus to transport the interested children. Still, volleyball went very well. Our group of 7 was extremely tired after the days end and found ourselves asleep after story time at 9pm. (Around the same time the Grandma’s and Grandpa’s of the world were hitting their pillows as well.)