Friday, November 30, 2012

Bonus

Middle school kids are good at a lot of things, but one of their weaknesses is cleaning up after themselves. It can be infuriating to plan a fun event and find yourself yelling at kids and picking up garbage at the end. Then they always say the same thing, "That isn't mine," and give you a wounded look when you ask them to throw it away anyhow.

Today we took our students bowling. This field trip was a team building opportunity that we scheduled to take the place of our annual corn maze visit which was washed out by Hurricane Sandy this year. As I've written before, it's a great trip-- the kids are contained and easy to supervise, but they have a lot of freedom, too. Plus, the price is right: ten bucks buys two games and a pizza lunch.

For a hundred kids, they gave us 25 pies and a drink cup for each with unlimited access to the soda fountain. As a matter of practicality, we put their names on the plain white Styrofoam cups, so they wouldn't get mixed up. 

We all had a fun time; for the most part, the trip did what we hoped it would-- kids and teachers had the opportunity to connect and build even more positive relationships.

And when it came time to leave? Clean up was extra easy, probably because there wasn't any question about whose trash it was.

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