The first thing you need to know about De-stress Fest is that you have to be very careful about how you pronounce destress, lest you inadvertently end up promoting an event called Distress Fest. The second thing you need to know is that trying to help students destress can be a little stressful.

A few weeks ago one of our Learning Center teachers approached me about hosting a Destress Fest in the library. Knowing that our students’ anxiety levels can get pretty high in the week before exams, we decided to host a day-long event in the library with activities, crafts, and peer tutors on hand to help students prepare for exams. Thanks to everyone on the AISL list for their suggestions!

Our library has a few small study rooms which we could use for peer tutoring, and we gave over about half of the main floor to crafts and activities. We had coloring, snowflake making, a puzzle, origami, a Stick Together of The Scream, and ornament making. The ornaments were a last-minute addition, as the supplies we had ordered for some other activities were delayed in the busyness of holiday shipping. My colleague made a last-minute store run to make up for the DIY Slime, modeling clay, and games we had ordered.

The Stick Together activity was a huge hit. We didn’t tell them what it was, so lots of students were focused on getting it done so they could see what it was (and we snuck in a stealth art history lesson). 

We got steady traffic throughout the day, and definitely had more takers on activities than we did on peer tutoring, which I suppose is to be expected on a Friday afternoon at the end of the term. Our afternoon was crowded with students who wanted to make ornaments (some students had been wearing the ones they made in the morning attached to their backpacks or jackets), but we were long out of supplies by then. It was hard to find enough de-stressing activities for everyone, but all were in good spirits!

We’ll definitely do this again, and now that we know how popular it is we’ll be sure to have more supplies on hand. In fact, we’ll be able to use the supplies we ordered for this event, which arrived Saturday morning.