Day 34

Start of week 5 of camp this week. Gosh we will be halfway through camps already this Wednesday. So hard to believe. I must be enjoying it too much. haha. So, as I mentioned over the weekend it is World Travelers week. Wooo! Today, we learned about prairies. These are really well behaved kids that we have this week, and they're soooo smart. I think it's gonna be a fabulous week :-)

So, after our lesson about the prairie we went into the zoo and visited the bald eagles and prairie dogs. Then, the animal presenter brought a ferret and the little alligator for the kids to see. Then, we did our little language lesson for the day... a bit of culture for the kids. So, I found that there are 11 official languages in Africa. Zulu is one that happens to be spoken in South Africa. Here's the words I taught the kids today:

o   Sawubona (sow-oo-born-a) – Hello

o   Sharp! (Shup!) – Great!

o   Yebo (Yeah-bor)- Yes

o   Ngi-ngu Jessica (Ingi-ngoo) – My name is Jessica.

o   Hambakahle (hum-ba-guy-ller) – Goodbye

We also rode the train today before lunch. The kids always have such a good time with that. Bella and Cayleigh let me sit with them. Then, I asked a row of boys and a row of a girls behind me to do some silly faces for me :-)

 Henry, Noah, and Greyson:

Lena, Samantha, and Cassidy:

After lunch, we worked on decorating little bags and the first few pages of our activity books. I told some the kids it might be cool to draw a world or some different animals on their bags since it's World Travelers week, and a lot of them liked the idea and did a fantastic job.

We had 8 campers that stayed til 4:00 with us today, the other 16 went home at 1:00. We should have one more for full day the rest of the week because Sebastian was sick today.

Here's our full day campers with their afternoon snack... starting in the lower left working your way around clockwise we have Scarlett, Nate, Oliver, Kaleb, Sam, Matt, Samantha, and Stephanie.

This week is week of the repeats. Seven familiar faces this week... Oliver, who is on his fourth camp with us; Scarlett, who is back for a third; Lena, who we just met last week; Kaleb, who was with us back on Splash! week; Samantha, who was also a Splash! camper; Grant, who we met way back in week 1; and then Sebastian, also from week 1. Zoo camp is pretty awesome, I have to admit :-)

So in addition to a good day at work, I got a message from a good college friend today asking if I'd be around Des Moines on Sunday... and, then I got a message from my professor Dr Heyborne saying he was thinking about coming to Des Moines later this week wondering if I'd be up for giving him my "inside scoop" tour of the zoo Friday or Saturday. Ahhhhhh, these messages made my day even better. If you can't tell by the way I've written so far, I'm having a pretty great day. I posted on Facebook a little while ago, "What a great Monday! How many times do you hear someone say that? haha".