This week at Playworks Illinois, we are celebrating AmeriCorps Week by acknowledging the amazing work that our AmeriCorps Members are doing in their school communities. Ingrid Korsgard (or Coach Ingrid as the students call her) has already achieved some great things at Alessandro Volta Elementary School, and we are expecting a lot more from her before the year is over! Read Coach Ingrid’s great account of Playworks making an impact at her school below:
“Like anyone working in a school will tell you, there are always those few children who cannot get along. At Volta Elementary, there are two third graders in particular who could not keep from hitting, bothering, throwing pencils at, or bullying each other during recess at the beginning of the school year. While it was hard for me to believe, my recess team (who has seen the boys grow since Playworks started here in 2013) informed me that they really had made huge progress. I did not believe them until late in January of this year. Two students ran up to me on the playground and frantically told me that the two nemeses were starting to fight. I rushed over to the scene of the crime expecting to see the boys yelling profanities at each other or worse; however, when I got there I found something completely unexpected… The boys were standing toe-to-toe engaged in a game of ro-sham-bo! A conflict over a soccer ball that could have escalated into a violent struggle was quickly resolved using ro-sham-bo between two unlikely students.”
