Lots of great thinkers in Tampa!

Walking into the youth center this morning on Macdill AFB I had no idea how this week was going to go. We have two sessions this week. In the morning we have kids ages 8 to 12 and in the afternoon we have ages 14 to 17 (most are taller than Ryan and I). Both groups have close to 30 kids and instead of 3 hours each like we've been doing, we are required to do 4 hour sessions on this base. I was most worried about the teens because they usually get bored a lot easier. However, after today I can honestly say that if I had to pick kids to have for 4 hours everyday, I would pick these kids! What an awesome day!

In the morning we improvised a lot of little filler games and activities and the kids responded really well.

Here they are on an epic roller coaster ride!

One of our little girls and I saved a frogs life this morning. Nyla spotted it in the grass so I ran inside and got a paper plate. I spent 5 minutes trying to scoop it onto the plate when she came over, picked it up with her hands and set it on my plate. She said, "here you go!" I said, "oh... thank you!"

My POC then came over and said, "Girl, what are doing??" I turned around with with a frog on a plate and she screamed, "OH MY GOSH THAT'S GROSS!!" Nyla and I just looked at each other and shrugged then proceeded to find a safe place to set it free.

Here he is on the plate...

and here he is in his new home!

I was really nervous when our teens came in for the afternoon session. They all just sat their so silent staring at us while we introduced ourselves and talked about camp for the week. I told them that it's okay to ya know... smile... and laugh and stuff.

It didn't take them long to warm up though. They made an AWESOME camp target and when we offered to let them pick their own teams they suggested that we pick for them since they'll just pick people that will tempt them to talk and not pay attention. Ryan and I spent our whole lunch break coming up with new strategies and altering our lesson plan to come up with something that we thought older kids would like.

I have never seen a group love the warm up activity "what if?" so much. All they wanted to do all afternoon was play that game. One of my favorite quotes went as follows...

Me: "What if we could only see if black and white?"

Gabby: "Well, all our clothes would match and we wouldn't have to worry about anyone looking like a hot mess!"

After "what if?" we had the teens work in their teams to come up with a team name and create a poster that represents their team. They had to present their posters to the whole group.

Here we have the X-treme Green team!

The Blue Team Epic Team!

The Red Losers! They explained that everyone on their team has been called a loser before but they turned it around into something positive. They said they are proud to be themselves!

Team Orange!

And last but not least we have The Legit Purple Rangers!

We hung all the posters up on their side of the wall!

I can't wait to see what these kids come up with tomorrow!!