What do popular candy bars have to do with helping students break down the social barriers that exist on school campuses around the country? During the annual Mix It Up day in Hart District schools, candy bar preferences are just one way of getting students to “mix up” their usual pattern of sitting at a “staked out” location each day at lunch.
National Mix It Up Day is sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, as part of its Teaching Tolerance program. The purpose of the day is to encourage and challenge students to shake up their routine of sitting with the same group of people each day, and instead to venture out and meet a whole new set of peers. What students typically find is that they make new friendships that last much longer than that.
Lunchtime cliques don’t necessarily have bad feelings or mistrust of one another, but they do position themselves around people they perceive as being most like themselves. Mix It Up Day is intended to change the rules for the day, and create an environment where the norm is to sit somewhere and with someone, different from yourself.
Cue the candy bars. One of the most popular activities used to get students to mix it up is to place posters at the lunch tables featuring large mock-ups of different candy bars. Other tables might feature different flavors of ice cream. When students come out for lunch, they are encouraged to sit at the table displaying their favorite candy bar or flavor, and to talk about why it is better than the others. Guess what? A new lunchtime group has just been created!
Another popular activity is for students to go on a scavenger hunt, looking around campus for the letters found in the phrase “Mix It Up.” The students who find the letters to spell out the motto form a group that reports to the outdoor stage, where they complete a “getting to know you” quiz and win a prize.
This year’s national Mix It Up Day is November 10. Hart District schools have participated on a district wide scale since 2005. Students will be doing line dancing, conga lines, creating crazy “secret” hand shakes, fussing about whether they prefer horses or dolphins, and yes, defending their favorite candy bar, all in the spirit of getting to know that kid they’ve gone to school with since the third grade, but have never really spoken to. In the Hart District, we continue to mix it up!