Recap of the Week

This week I was the lead in the Arts and Crafts morning camp for 6-8 yr olds. There were 36 kids signed up, 31 of them regularly showed up. The art teacher that works during the school year had designed the program and had put together boxes with all the supplies for the day's activities. Unfortunately, most of the projects seemed to be designed for 4 year olds or required too much mess to handle. Instead of the projects in the box, I came up with my own projects most of the time using the materials in the box. The kids were always getting antsy by the middle of camp so I started coming up with projects that required them to go outside for a while. The first day we found googly eyes and pipecleaners in the box so we had the kids find rocks and pinecones outside to make creatures with. The second day there was chalk in the box so we had the kids fill a square on the sidewalk with a picture, it turned out great! Then it rained and all the pretty pictures went away :( The last day the activities all revolved around sewing...which the kids were terrible at, and I felt bad having them make squares of fabric with buttons on them...LAME! So we found some felt puppets the kids could sew together...but the kids were really bad at it even though it seemed simple to me. In the end they turned out really cute and the kids liked them.
My afternoon camp was the 6-8 Crazy Kids Camp and it was run by one of the Youth Programs workers. It's really difficult having someone that is not Camp Adventure as the lead of a camp. Crazy Kid Camp involved a lot of messes and water games. Thursday (our last day of camp for the week due to the holiday) we had a "snow ball" fight with nylons filled with flour and then played water games...I was covered in flour paste, ick! Most of the kids had fun, but a few of them didn't play any of the games because they didn't want to get dirty...I'm thinking "why would you sign your kid up for a camp if you don't want them to get dirty or you know your kid doesn't like to get dirty?!" but oh well. That's the way it goes...
Tomorrow I'll be facepainting at the Freedom Festival from 11:30-4:30. I'm hoping to stick around for the fireworks. It will be interesting to see how the base celebrates the 4th in another country.