Halloween is right around the corner, and leading up to this spooky holiday are the parties celebrating it. Best Buddies and Science Olympiad teamed up on Monday Oct. 27 to throw a bash worth remembering.
“Best Buddies is about making friends. It’s easy for us to make friends but for people with special needs or IDD (Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities) making a friend can be one of the hardest things for them, so we do this to make their lives easier. [The Halloween party] took a couple weeks of planning with [Mrs. Mary Jone Martin, Science]. She told us she was going to bring in some stuff like her catapult. I think it’s the coolest thing here,” Jacob Taylor (12), President of Best Buddies, said.
Members of both clubs worked to set up six fun and different party stations, such as the airplane station, spoon races, bingo, coloring, catapulting and a ball bounce.
“We started [having Halloween parties] last year. We’d like to make it an annual event. Last year we had more of like build events, but the kids had a good time doing this. I believe strongly in community service. These kids have been blessed, and they need to pass that information to other kids,” Mrs. Martin said.
After everyone finished participating at the stations, donuts and apple juice were offered.
“I thought [the Halloween party] was pretty cool, honestly. I liked how we could go around in stations. It was really fun. I think my favorite station was the Ball Bounce because it really brought out some of the characteristics of some of the kids. Today I met a lot of the Peer Buddies and learned more about them. I got to socialize with a lot of them,” Kaitlyn Fassoth (12) said.
With hopes of having an annual Halloween party, Mrs. Martin plans to have the two clubs work together for the event every year. Including two clubs means having more brain power to come up with new and creative ways for the party to run smoothly.
“This is just a combination of having some fun with everybody doing it and celebrating and giving them some candy. The neat thing about this from last year is that a lot of the buddies saw the kids and said, ‘Oh I remember you.’ So it struck the Science Olympiad kids that this is an hour’s worth of time, and they understand that kids of all abilities can come together and have a good time,” Mrs. Martin said.
