In my last DITL post, I just finished submitting for the Desmos fellow and I was going to tape my class the next day for the PAEMST application. And, I was looking forward to our youth group's big fundraiser dinner that was on April 8th. A month has come and gone. My PAEMST application is almost, almost complete. I am waiting for one more letter of reference to upload and then I will hit submit and forget about it!
This last week was an exhausting one. I was toast by the end of Wednesday and it was only Wednesday. The weather was rainy and a few of my students were not making good choices and these impacted them, the class, and me. It was draining to deal with. But, the antidote to this is to surround yourself with people who are choosing to do good! And, that's what this weekend was about.
Our youth group got together on Friday night to make the decorations and organize our drawings for Saturday's dinner. This year we are going to the Adirondacks in NY so we called our dinner "A Starry Night Pasta Dinner" and had a cabin by the lake theme. It really came together nicely. The kids have worked hard since January advertising, planning, coming up with the theme and the decorations and all this hard work paid off last night. They even made a fun photobooth with backdrop and campfire. (Look at the fire. It was a fan with streamers on top of soup cans surrounded by black paper and paper mache rocks.)
We recognized two women who have helped me volunteering as youth ministers for the past five years and who are graduating with their daughters. And, we thanked these four senior girls plus one who wasn't here for their four years of dedicated to our youth group:
Yesterday morning, I had time to squeeze in a zumba class before some last minute errands to get ready for the dinner. Then, we arrived at the church at noon to start setting up for the 6 pm dinner. We transformed our church hall into this lake theme with birch trees and lots of stars.
When I think about teaching, I think about myself providing opportunities for kids to learn. With youth group, I am offering kids the opportunity to do good. They want to do good. They are energetic, positive, and dedicated. With some help from us adults with resources and support, this group does amazing things! It also helps that we have a church and town community that support us.
It was a pasta dinner with a high school band, The Fuze, who are just amazing. We had them play last year and booked them again. 3 out of the 4 who played are seniors. One brother is a freshman, so we booked him for next year. We had a Heads or Tails game to buy into to win a donated Bose soundsystem. We had lots of drawing and silent auction items and a 50/50. Our hall was packed. Dinner was delicious. We asked Olive Garden to donate salad and breadsticks and they did. We had adults volunteer to cook the dinner. The kids helped replenish the buffet and clear the tables. It was a great community event with people winning prizes, catching up with friends, and listening to good music. All in all, it was a success! (Notice the Big Dipper behind the band?)
I got home around 11 pm, that's why no post yesterday. This was definitely the positive fix I needed for the week! Four more days until April break!
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