There will be feasting and dancing...

So much to catch up on, so I thought I'd post a quick blog before bed. Last week was an interesting one, as I'm beginning to learn that ALL weeks are interesting in City Year. My house hosted the corps-wide Halloween party last Sunday. Tons of people showed up! We had so much food, played donut on a string and twister, and watched Silver Bullet. A roaring success, if I do say so myself.

Tuesday was the day of Halloween. My team led unity rally, so we made the corps do the Time Warp in PT. Some people thought it was silly, but I was amused, and really, what else matters?? My team was kind of in a funk, so we decided to scrap our original plans for after school and took a trip to Market Basket instead. 27 dollars later we had oodles of sugary substances for the kids to build haunted gingerbread houses using graham crackers, frosting, and loads of candy. The kids had a blast, we had a blast, and it was probably our least productive but most successful day of after school to date. The following day, in-class was a mess and after school was disastrous. One of the kids who does all the City Year stuff had to be sent to the principal for disciplinary action after his behavior in after school. However, my classroom teacher is amazing and assured me that this happens every year. You pump the kids and corps members full of sugar for a day, and there are bound to be behavior problems coupled with low tolerance. But we survived the day and things could only look up after that. Thursday was much better.

Pictures of my team, and pictures from Halloween haunted house building :)







Over the weekend, Sara and I worked on a proposal for the Clinton Innovation Awards. My team role for the year is to co-facilitate the Destination Imagination program after school. (For more about DI, go here: http://www.idodi.org/ I'm too tired to write about it now). Sara started a DI team at Somersworth where she served last year. This year we don't have a City Year team in Somersworth, but the DI program is continuing. We're also starting up a team in Seabrook and one in Hampton. The award proposal is to try to make DI a network-wide program. We're asking for the funds to go to other City Year sites to make presentations about DI and provide some materials so that they could start their own DI programs. The award is fairly competitive, but I think we have a good outline. We submitted the outline today and we'll get feedback from staff so that we can create the actual proposal to send in. It would be AMAZING to get the funding for this--we'd get to travel all over to talk about DI. I can't think of anything better than that right now :) Keep your fingers crossed for me. Even if we don't get funding, I want to go to Boston and Rhode Island to present the program to them.

Off to bed, I'm exhausted.