All East Union students took turns Friday, January 3rd visiting the gym with their classmates to celebrate earning 618 Shield Cards as a school total during this school year.

Students earn these Shield Cards for following "The Lancer Way" of being Safe, Kind, Respectful, and Responsible. During their time in the gym, stations were set up connected to each student's top RIASEC letter.

RIASEC is a career exploration tool that helps people understand their interests and how they relate to different types of work. It stands for six personality types: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. By matching a person's strengths and preferences to these categories, it can guide them toward careers they might enjoy and thrive in.

The idea is that if students are exposed to different learning opportunities based on their areas of strength it makes the learning even more meaningful.

In the gym on Friday the six stations consisted of:

• R- (Realistic)- Making Fleece Tie Blankets for The West Deer Shelter
• I- (Investigative)- A New Year's Kindness Word Search
• A- (Artistic)- Creating Cards and Pictures for Nursing Home Patients with DL High School Students who attend Beattie Technical School majoring in nursing
• S- (Social)- Students wrote messages on paper pieces of "toast" to toast their Appreciation to school staff members for their support and help each day
• E- (Enterprising)- Students created Kindness Campaign Tear Off Posters that will be hung around the school
• C- (Conventional)- Kindness Sorting Activity

When East Union staff designed these activities, they wanted to tie in the message of kindness.

"We talked about how in the New Year people often make resolutions of things they want to focus on doing more often," Mrs. VanderSchaaff, the East Union principal, said. "I explained to the students that if we each sprinkled a bit more kindness into our days what a difference that could make!"

In order to keep the sessions running all day the students had the added fun of eating lunch in their classrooms. The students had a great time, and each session finished with a fun New Years countdown!