Do You Prancercise?

If you have followed any of our social media accounts at Brainerd Baptist School, you have undoubtedly seen the hashtag #learningisfunatbbs a time or two! Our faculty are committed to making the learning process fun and that literally happens hundreds of times a day throughout our campus. We believe children should laugh and enjoy coming to school each day and a fun environment helps make this a reality. When the pandemic hit, Ms. Connell came up with the idea of capturing videos of our Heimlich training doll (Hank!) and me doing various things around the school during the lockdown. What started as an idea for a funny video turned into many videos that were viewed thousands of times. I was honestly surprised at how many people watched me act silly (something that is not difficult for me) while talking to a doll. Several months back, I was eating dinner at a restaurant and a lady recognized me and asked me about the Hank videos. She told me that her kids enjoyed watching them and they don’t even attend our school!

For several years now, our faculty have had fun in the last chapel before Christmas Break performing our annual Christmas Skit (under the direction of Mrs. McCurdy). We have never mentioned to the students that the skits were happening, but they have almost become expected with students AND parents asking, “when is that funny chapel going to be?” This year, a COVID exposure forced us to cancel our last chapel and our performance. We were disappointed to not be able to laugh and create fun memories with our students (and poking fun at ourselves in the process). I’m not sure if the teacher video submission happened because we missed performing our annual skit, or several of us (especially Nurse Adams) just became enthralled with the “prancercise” movement. Either way, the idea was born for the creation of a faculty video into our annual video competition that highlights student health. If you have never heard of the term “Prancercise”, this video will probably not be as funny to you, but it is important to know that YES - this is apparently a real thing (go ahead and click on the link to see BEFORE you watch our video). Our teachers used this as the inspiration for our own health video. As always, the BBS faculty rose to the occasion covering all details like hair and costumes. While our video did not take home the top prize, we do believe that our students enjoyed getting to watch it in chapel recently.

On a more serious note, we want to say “congratulations” to London Stone for winning this year’s video competition with her combination of exercise knowledge and the song “My Shot” from the musical Hamilton!