Busy, busy, busy...

This past week was a whirlwind of activity...  I don't remember if I filled you in or not but I now work with the school age children for after school care.  This past week, the kids were out of school so we had them in our building all day every day.  In an effort to make planning easier on the staff, I took on most of the planning of activities and they only had to cover the basics.  The theme of the week was "Survivor" or "make it work with what you've been given."  I wasn't quite sure how the week was going to come across since they had never attempted anything of this nature at the center before but I had a lot of fun and the kids actually complained on the last day of camp.  When I assured them that we could possibly repeat the theme at some point, the cheer was deafening.  It was nice to know that they thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

To begin the week, I put the names of all of the children in attendance in a hat.  I placed five different colors of construction paper on the floor (one for each group we were going to have - based on staffing), began to pull the names of the children one at a time and place them on the different pieces of paper.  Once all of the kids were separated, I took the names of the staff, mixed them up and randomly placed them on the colored paper.  Once the groups were "assigned", they broke into their groups to come up with a group name and a mascot.  That afternoon, the groups were given random supplies to build their group mascot.  I was very impressed with how the kids used the supplies that they were given and that their attitudes remained positive with the different tasks they were given.  Some of the other tasks were to write a story using their mascot as the main character, create a book out of their story, make backdrop scenes for their books and create banners out of random pieces of material (three of the groups were given tacky glue, one group lanyard ribbon and scissors and one group paper clips to hold their banners together - I had to cover one of the groups and guess what connector I got - the paper clips...  one of the Kindergartner's suggested to open up the paper clips into "giant S shapes and poke holes in the fabric" which is what I would have done).  I hung up the banners on the wall by my desk and I plan on keeping them on display - the kids were very excited to see that I put them up.

For our last group meeting, the groups took turns reading their books to everyone and I presented everyone with a certificate of participation.  I also made stickers out of address labels for each of the kids to wear and you would have thought I had been giving out medals for how excited they were to receive their sticker.  Because I took a risk in doing something totally different from what has always been done during these camp weeks, I was glad to see that it went over so well with both the kids and the staff.  Tomorrow things go back to "normal" and we'll see how the day plays out.

Also this past week, I got to use one of the gifts I got for my birthday.  I got two tickets for a belly dance event and I took one of my belly dance gal pals along for the adventure.  I'm glad that I had another person go with me because we did get slightly lost looking for the venue (didn't help that we each had our phones giving us directions and there were a couple of times our phones were giving us conflicting information).  We finally found a parking garage, the venue and then our seats that were located in the 3rd row.  The show was a good combination of cabaret dancing and tribal/fusion (tribal/fusion being my favorite style) and during the performance they alternated which style you were watching (i.e. cabaret troupe, tribal solo, cabaret solo, tribal troupe, etc) and it kept the show very exciting/entertaining in my opinion.  I saw some things in the performance that I would like to try and see if I could integrate into my personal dancing but we'll see...

Well, since I have a busy week ahead, I think I'm going to close this down and read a bit before going to bed I think (in an attempt to get some sleep...  been tossing and turning quite a bit...).  Have a happy week, dear readers!