Dry Creek's Destination Imagination Globals
Destination ImagiNation® is a school program that promotes the teaching of creativity, problem-solving and team work among students of all ages - Kindergarten through College. The program begins each school year when new long-term "challenges" are received by the students in the member organization. Destination ImagiNation® is active in almost every state and over 16 countries.
Working under the guidance of volunteer managers, teams of five to seven students develop solutions to their chosen challenges and are given the opportunity to test their creative solutions against those of other teams. The solution to the long-term challenge is presented in skit format during competition. Teams learn to solve verbal and hands-on instant challenges. New challenges are designed each year and allow for competition in four age divisions. In competition, teams are judged in three areas: the effectiveness of the solution to the long-term challenge, the style of the solution and its overall effect, and the solution to an instantaneous challenge given to the teams on the day of competition. All the students receive the same challenges, thus their solutions vary - not simply because of age grouping but primarily due to the opportunity to think divergently.
Our team, made up of 2 fourth graders and 3 fifth graders, came together in January of this year to begin our DI season. We did not know each other very well and struggled at times to work as a team. Our challenge this year was an Improvisational Challenge called "News to Me". We were challenged to bring six news articles published within a week of the competition from six different categories such as Sports, Technology, Entertainment, Weather, etc. We brought our articles to competition and then had to pull a number to see which article we would use. We also pulled a number for an unrelated headline, which we had never seen, and a number for what DI calls a "One Minute Glitch" or "OMG." Once on stage, we were told what our article was and what the unrelated headline was. We were given just four minutes to come up with a skit that showed a cause and effect relationship between the article and the unrelated headline. We had to use at least two 2-person human props in the story. After our four minutes, we were given our "OMG" and given one more minute to put that into our story. The "OMG" could be something like, "All the characters are lions," or, "The scene takes place in an apple orchard". We then had five minutes to perform our entire skit and accomplish the task of showing cause and effect and including our human props and the OMG.
We had the privilege of competing with 932 teams in regional tournaments and with 291 teams at the state tournament. There were 5 different challenges and in our Challenge, we placed 3rd out of 24 other teams. This earned us a spot to compete at the Global Event. Colorado is sending 60 teams to Globals this year and of that 60, 9 teams are from Cherry Creek School District. It is our understanding that in the history of Dry Creek Elementary, we are the first team to compete at the Global Event.
GUESS WHAT?
We are a
local team that has earned the privilege to attend the Global Finals of
Destination ImagiNation, Inc., a non-profit organization. We need funding to attend this event. There will be about 18,000 people in
attendance at the University of TN in Knoxville, May 23-27, 2012.
We are one of 60 Colorado teams representing our State. We must rely on our community to help us to attend and represent you in a magnificent way. We need your support. Our goal is to raise $9500 by May 15th. This is a short amount of time but we know with your help, we can accomplish our goal and attend this once in a lifetime opportunity. Would you please consider giving a tax deductible donation to our team and helping us accomplish our goal? You would be joining the ranks of top quality national supporters of the program. These include: National Dairy Council, 3M, OfficeMax, MSC, Inc. and Velcro USA Inc.
For more information about Destination Imagination or the Global Event, please go to their website: www.idodi.org or www.globalfinals.org
Thank You so much for your support! We couldn't do it without you.
