Do you remember 6th grade? I remember it pretty well. Lots of middle-school drama between groups of friends, boys and girls, different cliques, etc. Well, although those days are behind me, I got to relive it for a few days last week at Science Camp!
The 6th grade at C-dog's school takes the kids each spring up to Prescott, AZ to a camp up in the mountains for a fun getaway. They have a bunch of parents volunteer so that each parent has 3-5 kids assigned to them in a group. I had 3 boys from our ward in my group.
We met at 7:30am on Wednesday morning to find out who would be in each group. Then we waited around (waiting around would become a common occurrence) until 8:30, when they started loading the buses. Yes, the big yellow school buses with the green padded seats and no shocks. I swear they weld the axles to the frame on those bad-boys. Add that to the fact that I could not physically sit forward in the seat due to my long body, and that we had a 3 hour ride and I'm pretty sure that I have a decent shot at disability in some states!
At least I had my new blackberry storm to play with on the way up. It's fun to have mobile internet. I was showing the kids videos from youtube. They really liked the video of that big dog robot. All of them asked right away: "does it have guns??" I hope the designers of this robot have seen the Terminator movie...
Back to the topic at hand: science camp was fun. They did have classes, but not many and they were short. We ended up playing a lot of basketball and ping pong. I wish they would have told us about all the downtime: I would have brought a football, uno, other games, etc. It's really hard to entertain 11-year-olds with nothing!
The favorite activity was the gym- they had a rock wall and a zip line.
C-dog was brave and jumped off the wall, and loved the zip line!
This is just to show the scale of the zip line start height. Non-trivial, I'd say.
Because there wasn't much to do, one of the major events at camp was waiting in line for meals. There were three problems: They made us wait outside the door until the EXACT minute that the meal should start; if you were at the end of the line, you had to wait a long time to receive any food; and there weren't enough seats for everyone in the dining area. Everyone figured this out after the first meal, and started arriving early to line up. It got to where you had to be in line 20-30 minutes early to be toward the front of the line. And the line was long, see!
I also had to try to keep track of one of my boys, who HAD to be with his friends the whole time. It wouldn't have been too bad, except that his parents were terrified that his eternal soul was at risk at Science camp, and had tasked me with saving him. Anyway, he's a good kid and there were no problems, besides occasionally wandering off.
One funny event was orienteering class. The teacher gave us a compass and a list of headings. We were supposed to follow the headings until we found the station for each heading. Then we were supposed to punch the paper with the punch tied to the station. Simple, right? Well, it only works if all the stations are in place- someone removed the 2nd station the night before we did the exercise. So we wandered around back and forth at 300 degrees until we decided that something was wrong.
See how clean they kept the room?!?!
The fire was fun, and the teachers tried really hard to only let a small group of kids down to the fire at a time. Yea, right- it was a madhouse, but no one was burned.
The dance was pretty fun. C-dog didn't really dance, but he had fun wandering around having people sign his book. I challenged him to get a girl to sign his book. This was mostly just a tease because I remember being terrified of girls at his age. He promptly ran off and got 3 girls to sign. Surprised, I asked him to get 3 more, so he ran off and got 10! He had most of the kids at the camp sign it. I was really proud of him. I can't believe how much he's changed in the last year. The dance was kind-of a PJ dance. That's why some of the kids are in PJs, and some have PJs over their jeans. This video was early on, before the dancing really started. Some of those kids were good dancers.
Ahh, 6th grade...
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