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Smurthwaite Scholarship and Leadership House

Tag: Educational

Spring Retreat and Ringing in the New Year (In that order)

Posted on by Evan Demuth
The traditional photo op after hungry hungry hippos.

Spring Retreat by Codie Boyd

A new semester at K-State means new beginnings in classes and in Smurthwaite. So, to start our semester in the house off right, we had our Spring Retreat. This year’s Spring Retreat had several events ranging from bonding activities to a Chiefs watch party. The theme for the house this semester is the Wizard of Oz and several of our activities were related to this theme. One activity that we did was titled “In Search of a Brain”. This activity was a scavenger hunt where we all followed clues to find brooms that we needed to take to the “Wizard” (our president, MacKenzie). The girls had a lot of fun with the hunt and we were all rushing to be the first team to finish. Another activity that we did was a game of hungry hungry hippos. This game is played by one person holding a basket and laying on a rolling cart while another person pushes them around and they try to collect balloons in their basket. Then, the team with the most balloons collected wins! Everyone really enjoyed this game and several of us can’t wait until we get the chance to play it again. Continue reading “Spring Retreat and Ringing in the New Year (In that order)” →

Everyday November

Posted on by Evan Demuth

November was a short month being capped off by a whole week of Thanksgiving break. This month we’ll highlight some of the programs presented. Each woman in the house is required to put on an educational program of some sort during the school year. A few members wrote a bit about their programs:

Meet Julia by Katherine Boulanger

Perceptions vs. reality around the autism spectrum. While it’s commonly seen as a sliding scale of “a little autistic” to “severely autistic,” areas such as motor skills, language, or executive function may be different even on a day-to-day basis and can’t easily be averaged as “mild” or “severe.”

At the beginning of November, I did a program on Autism Acceptance, using the Sesame Street episode “Meet Julia” as a framing device to provide an introductory overview of autism and autistic people. To prepare for this program, I began doing research as early as July, using both scholarly sources, as well as testimony from actual autistic persons (hence the use of identity-first language, which is preferred by many members of the autistic community). The program focused on different aspects of autism and autistic people’s experience, such as sensory sensitivities and language processing differences, as well as some of the ways in which autistic people face discrimination in our larger society. Near the end, we also had a just for fun section featuring both canon autistic characters and common headcanons. Continue reading “Everyday November” →