I’ve been helping Resurreccion with VBS this week. Here are the highlights!

— 1 —

Being able to be useful. I’m one of the few native Californians that doesn’t speak Spanish (I understand it but can’t speak it) and there was already a church youth group doing the program so I offered to just be an extra set of hands whenever I was able this week. This meant washing dishes for Christ. 🙂 They needed someone to do the breakfast dishes so I jumped to it. I may or may not have flooded the kitchen (twice) on Tuesday but I figured stuff out so that I was able to do all of it on my own on Wednesday. I’m bummed that I woke up with a migraine this morning and didn’t get to help. 🙁

— 2 —

Learning how to play Uno in Spanish. The church doing the program had math board games and card games for the kids and that included Uno. Most of the kids knew how to play it but one little girl didn’t… and didn’t understand a lot of English. I learned (and in a few cases reinforced) my colors in Spanish and learned the word for “zero” in order to explain what card she needed to play. (Like most kids who grew up watching Sesame Street, I did know how to count to ten.)

— 3 —

Doing the “Penguin Song” with some of the kiddos. Because it is *ALWAYS* appropriate to sing at VBS!

— 4 —

Teaching my kiddos to sing “When I Was One”. We had kids as young as 3 and it’s kind of hard to find math boardgames to do with them (they eventually just had them do extra playground time) so I did “When I Was One” with my younger kids to reinforce their numbers in English and because it’s fun. 🙂

— 5 —

Learned my numbers up to 20 in Spanish. One of the helpers with the math games had the same idea I had: drilling the younger kids on numbers and having them yell them back in Spanish.

— 6 —

Learned some new games. This one was popular with the kiddos.

— 7 —

Gave a lot of high fives to kids. When I was playing “Set” with some of the littler kids, I’d give them high-fives when they made a set because social praise is a fabulous reinforcer. Their smiles were so incredibly wonderful.

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