Week 11
Monday was a day filled with finishing our final report and preparing our lesson about insects for the Jane Boyd Community House on Tuesday. We were excited to see everything come together in the report and look forward to giving our final presentation next week. Make sure to watch us live Thursday, August 5 at 9 a.m. on our Rising Star Facebook page.
“All about insects” was the topic of our lesson Tuesday at the Jane Boyd Community House. We discussed what characteristics make an insect including an exoskeleton, a three-part body (head, thorax, abdomen), six legs, compound eyes, and a pair of antennae. Then the youth got to build their own insect out of several different colored pipe cleaners. We then hid the insects all around the playground. The youth had to find as many insects as they could within 30 seconds. The goal of this activity was to introduce the concept of camouflage and help the youth understand why insects use certain colors to blend in with their surroundings. We finished the lesson with a snack of “ants on a log”, which contained celery, Wowbutter, and raisins.
We started the day Wednesday, getting everything ready for our last program with the Creative Kids Company in Shellsburg. We are excited to do active BINGO with them as it has been a popular activity with our other program areas. Last week we divided our written report into sections for each of us to practice, and today we did the first run-through of our final presentation with our assigned parts. We are excited to polish and finalize our presentation and cannot wait to present it to everyone next Thursday. We spent the last part of our day we helped to organize the office. We organized all of the fair ribbons that were not handed out into bins and did a final count to estimate how many will be needed for next year.
Thursday: We woke up bright and early to meet with the Creative Kids Company in Shellsburg. The kids had fun explaining why physical activity is important and completing all of the different activities and exercises in active BINGO.We had a chance to explore our creative sides and were tasked with a final project of updating the bulletin board in the conference room. We decided on creating a supply board to have in the conference room that can hold pencils, pens, notepads, etc., and went with a black background with blue accents and burlap trim. We got out of the office for a bit and headed over to the local fabric store in Vinton to get all the supplies we needed and then set to work. Lots of progress was made, and we are hoping to have it finished up by next Wednesday.
Today we finished our last program with Kids on Course University at Cleveland Elementary. We reviewed how to properly use kitchen knives and then made strawberry and grape fruit-kebabs by cutting and preparing fruit using kid-safe kitchen knives. For lunch, we had a small celebration highlighting the hard work of all of the interns and got Olive Garden to celebrate with the entire office. It is crazy to think we only have a few days left as Rising Star Interns, but we are very thankful for all of the fantastic experiences and opportunities we got to take part in along the way.
-Tatum and Maelyn