During the week of Halloween, a new, fun-filled event was created. Fall Fest was a new idea where Flint Hill as a community participated in Halloween-themed activities, one of which was to decorate your advisory door in a theme that was given to your hallway by the Student Council Association (SCA) and the Flint Hill front office.
The fall door decorating contest was an entertaining competition where different hallways were each given a theme to decorate their doors with. The Science Hallway theme was Frankenstein, the Math hallway was Mummy Manor, the English hallway was Dracula themed, the History hallway was themed Graveyard, while the Language Hallway was decorated in a witch theme. It was our first year doing this at Flint Hill, and the result was amazing. Instead of decorating doors by grade level, our themes were assigned by hallway, fostering a sense of community and competition with students who were not in the same grade level. Ms. Joelle Tam, the Dean of Student Life and Community, commented, “Having the competition done by the hallway was really intentional because we actually wanted it to be a cross-grade level activity! We were hoping that by having advisories of different grades work together, it would be an instance of community building.” The whole door decorating contest, in general, was fun for everybody, as it encouraged creativity and coordination for each hallway to look its best.
When interviewing the head of the Upper School, Mr. Chris Tennyson, he said that the door decorating idea came to him during a discussion with the Upper School office about ways to have fun as a community, and Fall Fest was the idea that prevailed from that discussion. Mr. Tennyson’s overall objective when developing the idea was to bring together different grade-level advisories with the ultimate goal of having fun before Halloween. Mr. Tennyson commented, “I hope that it gave the advisories another reason to work together and have some fun. I also hope that it allowed advisories with different grades to come together to make sure that their halls looked awesome (which they did!). Ultimately, I hope that this activity and the entire week just allowed all of us to have a little bit of fun leading up to Halloween and a long weekend.” Because we loved this whole week of Fall Fest, we made sure to ask what the ideas were for next year and if we would be doing it again. To this, Mr. Tennyson replied with another innovative idea: “One idea that I had was an advisory pumpkin painting contest, and then we could judge them and send them down to the Lower School during their Halloween parade.”
We would like to ask our readers, what do you think about this idea? Please put your input or any other ideas in the comments. This is just another great example of what the Flint Hill Upper School has to offer, and we can’t wait to see what they come up with next year!
