Unforeseen Challenges and Fun with Paper

Unfortunately I have been rather terrible about blogging here. However, it is not because I am too lazy to write about what I am doing. In reality, I haven't been working on my EDGE project at all for some while. Even though I accounted for several possible problems when I planned my project, I did not account for my work being the problem. When I started my summer job, I was promised Wednesday evenings off to work with the kids. A few weeks into the summer, they stopped giving me the night off. However, two weeks ago I started getting them off again, so I am back to work, even though my project is now behind schedule.

Two weeks ago, another volunteer planned the activity. He taught the two attending kids how to make unique paper airplanes. This was fun, but most of the work was done by the adult volunteers. And even some of us were confused by the complexity of the folds. This taught me two things:

1. Focus on the activities rather than the crafts. Kids love to play with their hands. Making things is a way to do this, but the children loved playing with the paper airplanes more than they enjoyed making them.

2. Know your age group. It is so hard to predict the ages of the kids that come to Kids' Group. However, a three-year-old can't fold a dragonfly-shaped airplane, and thirteen-year-old won't want to play "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes."

In keeping with the paper theme, I thought I would share a simple paper craft with y'all as my lesson plan: complimentary fortune tellers. I don't know about you, but I certainly remember making these folded paper things in elementary. However, writing compliments instead of fortunes inside the craft makes it more emotionally valuable to these kids, which is what we strive to do at Kids' Group.

I don't have much to report from last week. We volunteers had a planning meeting to coordinate activity ideas, which is going to make everything so much easier from now on. However, I was not able to attend the actual Kids' Group because I had work.