Cinder Fella, DDR, The Beach, Laser Tag, Seafood.

Wow, no posts in almost a week. Embarrassing. Rather than recounting day by day and detail by detail what happened since the last post, let me just say the last week has been filled with mostly LEGOs and working on the website. Nothing too interesting to post.. until Friday.

Friday was the day for me to start work on the Puppet Show with the children, so the day before, I assembled the PVC Pipe Puppet Theatre (total engineering skills necessary) and picked the play we would do: Stable Fella. It's basically a western twist on Cinderella, with the main character as a guy instead of a girl. It includes such celebrities as the Fairy Hogfather as well. Just the name Fairy Hogfather pretty much sold me on the play. So, anyways, I made copies of the script, highlighted parts, and made a tentative calendar of practices/events. We really don't have but 3 practices to get this show together, so I'm counting on the kids to be motivated.
Once Friday morning rolled around, I waited for the participants to arrive. We had about 7 - the perfect number for the play. That day was going to be a "read-through," where we did just that - read through the play. I distributed parts and watched the children read their parts aloud, scene-by-scene. This was where I began to notice the wide discrepancies in reading level. Of course, they were all different ages (from 8 to 12), but one of the 8-year olds couldn't even get through one sentence without serious help from his friends. He had apparently been held back in 3rd grade, too. Cases like this one make me think of the snowball effect that these cases can often grow into. First, the student gets held back and might lose motivation because his friends are in a different grade and moving on without him or her. Then, the students grades suffer even further, and he or she is just moving along at the bare minimum. How do we solve this problem? Or does the existing teaching system between school life and home life (this is a big one) need to be improved? Interesting things to ponder on.
Nonetheless, the read-through went well, and I feel like the parts I assigned were quite good matches, and the children seemed excited about the read-throughs.



On Saturday, Nancy and her friend Torsten came to Marion for a day at Myrtle, along with me, David Womble, Lauren, and Alice. We piled into the Rav (I love Rav roadtrips), with Torsten graciously taking the trunk, and drove down to the beach. We first stopped and had Gyros on the boardwalk, near the Gay Dolphin (yes, that's the name of the store), and then Nancy and I played DDR. Man, just like good old times - except our lack of practice caused us to fail multiple times. But it was still a lot of fun. We went down to the beach and just relaxed, played in the ocean, buried our feet... that kind of thing. After that, we went to go play Laser Tag - which was really fun, except for little kids who follow you around and keep shooting you. They are the ones who always end up doing better than me. Somehow, I managed to be the top person on our team though! So that was cool. We came back and had dinner at Dry Dock Seafood - for $15 we had a great seafood buffet. It reminded me a lot of Georgetown Seafood, before it closed. At home, Lauren and I played DDR, then we watched a few episodes of the funny British show, "Faulty Towers." A satisfyingly fun day for sure.