Wow.
Last week, our registration numbers stood at eight. Then this past Sunday, it climbed to ten. So we were thinking there would be maybe twelve kids in the Middle School class.
Twenty-five showed up last night.
Can you say "flustered"?
One of the reasons we had decided to do the projects we picked, was because we were thinking we'd have relatively low numbers of students. When we had such a huge number, we had to scramble to get enough materials to keep the kids busy.
The obvious first step was to split the kids up. Oddly enough, we had a pretty even boy-girl split, so we did the boy-girl thing; I took the girls into the craft room and got them started on the treasure boxes while Cheryl did the lesson with the boys. Then we switched at snack time.
It went sorta OK. I only had to get after a few of the boys for being rude and disrespectful (they were day-care kids, so I was sorta surprised at their misbehavior, until it was later explained to me that they hadn't seen each other in a while and were in the "impress the other guy by seeing who can misbehave the most" mode). But overall things went very well, other than the initial panic at the large numbers.
I forgot a few things. Like the fact that the kids didn't know enough about painting/staining to hold the brushes right. Or NOT to dip the entire brush (up to the handle) into the paint. Or to wipe off the excess paint/stain before dripping it all over the table. Or how to keep the newspapers I'd put on the tables from shifting around. So there was a big mess to clean up afterward.
We didn't get out of there the first night til nearly ten. Clean-up was a pain.
Tonight, we had several 'helpers', so things went a lot better. Cheryl had one helping out with the lesson/snack room, and I had a couple in the craft room, and somehow the presence of some other adults helped to keep the kids in check.
Of course, there was still lots of clean-up involved, but it wasn't as bad as before. Once we get the rhythm down, it'll go a lot better.
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