Spirit week is a fun tradition in many schools, particularly in the United states, designed to enhance school spirit, unity and community among students and staff. It’s a week filled with themed days where students and teachers dress up and participate in activities. The primary goal is to make a sense of community, engage creativity, and make school more engaging. While spirit week is most common in the U.S, the concept of themed school events can be adapted in any place. In Brazil, for example, schools might have similar activities. At Escola Americana de Campinas this tradition is practiced a lot and the teacher that coordinates this event is Gabriela Denucci, a former student who is a teacher today.
Gabriela Denucci is the head of this event and we had the opportunity to ask her some questions about the development of the spirit week in EAC and her own experiences. She shared with us that her first experience with this was in her elementary school in Argentina. She attended an American school and she tells us that: “I loved the energy and the opportunity to wear pajamas and costumes since I had always studied at schools that had uniforms”. This experience from the young Gabriela shows that spirit week also makes people feel happy for something they normally can’t, like using what they desire to use, in her case the pajamas.
In her high school at EAC, she had many spirit week experiences to share to the school community because of her previous experience in the U.S. Gabriela said that the spirit week already existed in the school but was a bit forgotten but the idea of bringing it again came with the creation of the giant council in 2019. She said that they wanted to bring back this friendly competition between classes and promote the happiness of students by gathering with their classmates to get the most points possible. The pandemic came a little after the return of the spirit week but this wasn’t a barrier to the spirit week happening, Gabriela found a way to make the spirit week continue so students could be connected and could interact during this lockdown period. Despite the challenges imposed by the pandemic, Gabriela Denucci dedication ensured that the Spirit Week in Escola Americana de Campinas (EAC) not only persisted but it prospered. She innovated some activities allowing students to participate from their houses, Some examples are: Dress up days , online competitions, and other activities.
When school became again in person, Spirit Week came back strong with nice activities that enthusiastically made kids compete between each other and most importantly make sure that the Spirit week is making the school spirit and core values evident. Spirit week at EAC exemplifies the commitment of doing an inclusive and spirited community. Here we have some images and a video showing some students participating in the activities proposal and a video showing some challenges that students needed to overcome to win the games.
EAC PRESS 
As a student from EAC, I totally agree that Spirit Week is a fun week in which students can “forget about school” and have some fun. Spirit week is very enthusiastic because of the competitions between the grades, and because of the price, that its usually a pizza party. People have a good laugh when seeing each other dressing as characters or dressing as decades.
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Very interesting article, I always considered spirit week lightly; I never knew it had such a background story involved, including the motivation behind Ms. Gabriela. Additionally, the importance and impact of Spirit Week spreads from a report I heard from Ms. Regina, where she tells that such event was highly praised and seen highly by other schools and administrators in a congress she went.
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Showing appreciation to the Spirit Week is really important, it is a week full of fun and competitions between classes that is really important here at EAC. The Spirit Week is a week in which the Giant Spirit is really shown here in EAC where those who really love it are competitive in it. Great article.
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