Good Monday morning!! Here at Ardenti we are coming off of a weekend of fun after having had our Gwinnett Braves fundraiser where we went out to the ball game and had fun with friends watching some awesome baseball.
This week we are officially one month out from our inaugural Belize summer service learning trip and it got me to thinking… How on earth did I get here so quickly? Well, I had some amazing help to get me to where I am today: one month away from a week long summer camp for kids in Belize City and then a few short months after that we will embark on our 12 day trips to Belize and Jamaica!
Our summer service learners started out meeting weekly on Friday afternoons this past spring, to begin planning the curriculum for our summer camp. Every week for about 8 weeks we met and came up with our daily activities for campers complete with themes, crafts to match the days themes, PE games to match each day, and one of our service learners even learned all.the.things. about bucket farming so she could teach our summer campers about how to bucket farm and grow free sustainable grocery! We came up with the daily situation that our camp mascot would face and the solutions to them, we also came up with reading comprehension stories that matched the days themes so we could improve on literacy while hammering home our awareness issues.
Our summer camp name is Camp T.O.U.C.A.N. the Toucan is the national bird of Belize and the acronym is “Teaching outstanding urban children awareness now” an acronym that our service learners came up with while doing the weekly curriculum planning. We will be teaching kids awareness about drugs and drug prevention, literacy, staying in school, sex education and peer pressure.
I am so impressed with the work that went into this curriculum planning. I was there to guide our service learners but honestly they did all of the hard work. They really did get on board with what service learning truly meant! It has been my pleasure to work with such a great group of MILLENIALS!! Yes!! That’s right… you are not “precious little snowflakes” you are brilliant awesome amazing talented creatures that show me every day what I still need to learn! I have seen these students creatively tie sex education to awesome team building games, I have watched as my photographer makes a picture of a post card turn into brilliant art, I have seen words on paper turn into masterpiece literature for kindergarten through 5th graders to learn reading comprehension. You guys may think differently but I am here to tell you THANK GOD YOU DO!!
I could not be more excited if I tried to see all the great things that are going to come out of this service learning trip this summer and how these students are going to ROCK! I could not be more humbled by the work and effort that was put into these kids that we will be volunteering with and I honestly am honored to have this particular group of service learners that will pioneer Ardenti Service Learning’s inaugural service learning trip. They made my job easy. And extremely FUN.
So here’s a new acronym for you Millenials that are reading: MILLENIAL: Making intelligent loving legacies empathetically, noticeably in-tuned, and lasting. You guys have my heart. Keep moving toward the prize. I’ve seen how you guys can move mountains!!
Follow our summer journey on snapchat: Ardentiglo Or facebook Ardenti Global Service learning, or Instagram Ardenti service learning or Twitter ardentiglobalserve we will be sending video updates throughout the week of July 15-22 so you can see first hand what we are doing!
And if you want to learn more about how to sign up for one of our fall service learning trips click below and send us your info! Make the decision now to GO.PASSIONATELY.