Back at my home site!

This week I was back at Hill Top with the regular crew! It was good to be back with everyone. We had a great group of 6th graders come for the week. They loved everything we did with them, and loved being outside. My field group loved catching frogs and finding salamanders. We also spent 30 minutes of field group, one day, watching a bunny. It was awesome. Thankfully our weather has been beautiful as well.

This weekend I worked for the Girl Scouts. It was a mom and daughter event. I ran games all dy which pretty fun. They were all on the younger side so we played with the parachute a lot.

This coming up week we have 35 5-8 grade students coming. It's going to be a bit of a different week because they are from the gifted and talented program. So the 8th graders are going to be teaching some of our activities for the younger ones. I'm going to teach jellybellyology, shark dissection, stream stomp, and mega mega structures. Mega mega structures I'm teaching as a double with another teacher. We are going to have groups build several 3D shapes, as apposed to everyone doing one shape. Stream Stomp is where we walk through the stream to find animals. I'm looking forward to it.

A bit of a crazy week

Well as I'm sure you've all seen, it's been a bit of a crazy week. Thankfully I was in a safe place during all of the events. I was at camp in Plymouth all week. I was working a weekend event and I was working for camp for the week. The weekend event entailed putting up platform tents through out the property. It was a good workout. I also helped in the kitchen at meals. On Monday, since I had the day off, I went to plimouth plantation. It's a replica of the area where the pilgrims first landed.  It was pretty cool and interesting to learn about the dynamic between the native Americans and the pilgrims. When we got back we learned about the bombings. We still pressed forward and jumped into our week of camp. On Tuesday we had create it day, Wednesday was fitness day, Thursday was all about science, and Friday was supposed to be mystery day. I did both teaching and counseling. On tuesday I was counseling for K-3 students! On friday morning at 6:30 am our boss called and said we were canceling camp and needed to start calling parents. It was a bit of a stressful beginning. One of the other camps associated with Girl Scouts were put into lockdown and stuck at camp most of the day. It was a day spent listening to the radio and hoping it would be over soon. We also found out the second suspect was a student at the school at which Retha lives. Her husband and her dog were evacuated and had to come stay with us for the weekend.

Thankfully my weekend has been less stressful and more relaxing. Yesterday I hung out with coworkers watching the red socks game. Today I went to purgatory chasm, which is a bunch of  rocky hills and caves you hike through, and mystic aquarium. It was awesome!

This week I'll be teaching at hilltop. We have 125 6th graders coming. I'm teaching camouflage, megastructures, shark dissection, jelly belly ology, and soccer all digestion. It should be fun times!

Surprise your Teaching!

As I said last week, I thought that I would be an extra helper for this past week. I was wrong! I received a phone call, at 10:30 Sunday night, from the person I worked for in the fall saying they needed me to teach there this week. The week was good but long. The teachers from the school wanted there to be programming from 7:45am-9:30pm. (Usually we end our nights at 9.) Thankfully I had a very good field group. I ended up teaching megastructures, jelly-belly-ology, cultural fair, pigeon dissection (GROSS!!), and egg drop. Egg Drop is a physics class where the children have to create a mechanism to keep an egg safe. Their mechanism is dropped from a 2 story building. All the classes were pretty cool, with the exception of pigeon dissection. I only taught that class because I was asked too. Also, megastructures was a mega-fail this week. Because I had signed up for classes the day the kids arrived, I didn't have time to go check the amount of newspapers the site had. I found out as I was teaching class that there were not enough. Thankfully we had enough to build a small structure, and the kids enjoyed it.

On Wednesday we had our underground railroad simulation with the kids. I was signed up to play the role of a grifter. Basically, when a group of kids came by I tried to get them to give me money. Well I was waiting for the last group to come and I heard an animal in the woods walking around. I figured it was nothing to worry about. A few seconds later I realize its a coyote... and its now growling at me. As I stood there frozen, thinking of an exit plan, the final group showed up. Thankfully they scared away the coyote. It was terrifying! I am not sure what I am doing that keep attracting wildlife!

This week, I am working with the girl scouts. I started on Saturday, and work through until Friday. We had a group here putting up tents this weekend. Starting on Tuesday we have April Vacation Camp. I'm going to be running activities on some days and being a counselor on others. It should be a lot of fun, plus I am going to be meeting some girls that will be at camp this summer.

Today after work, myself and some of the other staff went to Plymouth rock. Thankfully they warned me that it was going to be smaller that I thought. Tomorrow morning I am going to Plymouth Plantation and working on planning summer program :D

As always here are some pictures from the week:

Dancing with the Woods

This past week turned out to be a very good one. We had a small group of catholic 5th and 6th graders come for the week. They were very well behaved and cute. I had 9 children in my field group who loved hiking in the woods. We found slugs, salamanders, frogs, and lots of deer and coyote tracks. We also had an all day field group this week. It is a 41/2 hour field group, instead of two. The kids all make pack out lunches and we eat off in the woods somewhere. This week me and my field group went to the blow downs to hike through. (The blowdowns is a section of property where a tornado went through  in 2011.) All was going well while we hiked through until we got to the bottom of the hill, where it turned into a swamp. At one time or another we all fell in the water attempting to balance on the smallest of branches. Once we found the driest path out we then got lost traveling in the woods. Eventually, after deciding to hike straight, we ran into a trail. The kids all thought it was super fun thankfully. No one was upset at being wet or lost. This week we also had TNL, which is a night where field groups prepare skit and preform them for one another. My filed group made up a skit called "Dancing with the Woods", a play on dancing with the stars. The 3 students that were contestants danced with various types of tree branches. They had one of the teachers in tears from laughing so hard.

Next week we have a group of 84 6th graders coming. I will be a "plus one" for the week. Basically I will not be teaching or leading a field group, but just helping out where help is needed. It should be a good week.

This weekend should be a good one. I am making baked spaghetti for friends tonight, and pannukakku for the staff brunch tomorrow morning.

As always, here are pictures from the week:

This is a picture of the blowdowns.