Nick and Lora's Infinite Adventure: South America bottom to top: Bird Fest cont.....

Bird fest is going well...mostly. Today we should be doing a double, two schools, two bird fests, one day, but there was a huuge storm last night with mega mpr winds that knocked down my tv antenna and garlic plant and all sorts of stuff throughout the city. The supervisor of the Environmental sector and the president of the organization Guyra were supposed to come out and watch/help/bring binoculars as well today and it aaalll got cancelled. We have another school to do tomorrow so we really needed those binoculars, so what we did was have our supervisor send them encomienda. Thank goodness for this system. Pretty much someone at some location can put stuff on a bus and send it to your location. So she sent the binoculars, a bird costume that some poor soul will wear and some prizes via the bus and we picked them up on the ruta by my house. So we're all ready for tomorrow!

Now this is our day of games, we did our charla day earlier with all the schools to lead up to this day. So far we've done it with one school.

How it went: With this school it was with the 5th graders only and our plan was to get them all together (there are 2 diff 5th grade classes in the morning and afternoon, four in total) do a big game with both classes together then split them back up. One class went with Lauren and I on a bird walk and the other stayed with Andrew to play some games. Then a break and we would reconvene and play a few big group games all together. Then I would give them their stickers and all would be well. Ok so it didn't go exxaactly like that. I was able to do a big group icebreaker game with them, kinda like tag but with an extinction theme. We did one round and then they were done with that.
We then broke up into the groups so Andrew could do his thing and Lauren and I could go bird watching. We had about 14 kids in the first group, 2 binoculars and no teacher, not by choice... he was just busy making fruit salad.... We pretty much just went to the plaza for 15 mins but there were enough birds there to look at. A little population of green parrots live in the plaza and, of course, lots of pigeons. The kids would get really excited when the spotted a bird and really wanted to see them with the binoculars and would always point them out to me and Lauren. It was cute. But then they all ran to the playground to play, and there was no controlling them. We did the same for the next group until they told us they had to go to gym class and then recess. oookkkk. So much for our event, we just waited till they were done to try and have our big games. At this point we were kinda burnt out because these were the most rooouuudiest kids ever! Sooo hard to settle down and we were just yelling over their voices all the time, it was really difficult! We decided to cut our large games down to one and we only played it once, after the kids ran off before I could give them a sticker. The one teacher who was helping us seemed like he was a step away from having a heart attack from yelling at the kids which also helped in our decision to end early. I just gave the stickers to the teachers to hand out later.

We were scared for the afternoon class and decided to try not to make it long but thankfully it went much smoother! Tomorrows school is a big one, we will be working with 102 kids in the morning and 73 in the afternoon..and there will be some friend coming in to help manage it, 6 volunteers in all we will be!!