Welcome to Elisa's Blogosphere!: Northlake End of Year Party!

Okay, so I'm a tad behind on my posting but am working on catching up nonetheless.

We finally had the end of the year party for the students we tutored at Northlake Elementary this past school year.

The festivities took place at a local park, Granger Recreation Center, and the theme for the day was "City Bingo."

The kiddos (all 68 of them - ranging from 3rd-5th graders) arrived at the park around 11:30. We started off the days activities with the Bingo game. There were 7 of the 32 tutors selected at random to be "team leaders," and by pure blessing, I was chosen as one.

I was so happy and you'd think I wouldn't maybe want to be a team leader because that meant I'd have about 6 kids assigned to me during the game. Well, I was thrilled because I would get to have my 2 kids automatically with me. The rest of the group would be randomly selected for me.

I ended up with an awesome group - 2 girls & 4 boys (Carlos, Isabel, Angel, Martin, Fernando & Diana).

The way the game would be played would be like this: The remaining 25 tutors that were not selected as team leaders, would be spread out across the park and would serve as "bingo places." What we as teams had to do was run to the people and ask them "What do you do at the City?" If their response was on our bingo card, we'd have them sign it. The middle piece was a freebie as the team leaders job description was on there and so all we did was sign off on it.

Off to the races we went and I do mean running involved. Times like these, I'm grateful I can still run because we did a lot of that. We tried our best and gave it our all and finished in 3rd place. The most important thing (& I did check) was that the kids had fun. Heck, I had a blast! I hadn't run around like that in a long time.

When everyone was done, we all gathered back up in the recreation center and played a couple of more games. One of the cool prizes for having a post-it to the bottom of your chair was a free meal from McDonald's for an entire year for FREE! Okay people, in these hard times, anything for free is cool, can't beat a McDonald's meal, at least I'm sure the two kids that won that were super duper thrilled.

We were finally able to eat: pizza, drinks and a lemon chill to help cool us off.

Parks & Recreation was kind enough to sponsor the event which turned out great, as they brought along 2 inflatable bounce houses. These looked like so much fun, but I'll be glad to post that I contained myself resisted the temptation of jumping in for some jumping fun.

I had an extremely good time - played a couple of races with the kiddos and beat them every race (yeah for old people still young at heart)! I was really sad when 1:30 finally rolled around because we had to say our good byes to the kids.

I must have gotten a hug or hugged my kiddos a million times. It is really neat what a bond you can build with these kids with something as small as tutoring them for 30 minutes once a week. With as much fun and as rewarding as the experience was this year (my 1st), I'll be back for round 2.

Here are some pictures of the days activities:

This was my gift to Carlos. He always told me how he was loosing his soccer balls and so I thought it would be a good idea to replace his, even if it only lasted for a weekend. He really liked it which made it even more special for me.