Archive for July 16th, 2012
Sagrada Monday
Monday is the big launch day for our week at The Community. We see which of our kids are still in the casa from last year, we get the rooms set up for the morning, we see how the new format for the worship time is going to work, and we are seeing how our recent tweaks to the Bible reading to learn English — we call SJS for Sharing Jesus Story — is going to work.
We board our buses and leave by 7:00 in the morning for the 60-80 minute ride to The Community. We rest, talk, and read through our lesson plans each day. Several of us, primarily led by Donna, put together our suitcases of supplies for each day so that there would not need to be much packing or unpacking for us at night. We take ALL of our teaching supplies for 8 learning and experience centers for each morning. These are placed on the bus along with all the other teaching teams’ resources. Our focus this week is on God make all five of our senses to experience His beautiful world, so the exercises are very important.
We arrived right on time to go get our girls from their casa and help them find their place to sit. It is great to have them seated in their correct spot, but since we are first in, the morning can get a little long for our little girls! The worship time is always fun and Ricky Pruitt did a great job leading the worship today — most of which was in Spanish, but some was also in English. The songs were most fun songs, but many of our girls — even the youngest ones — love to sing. Spicing the worship time up was a skit performed b our own Steve Rowlands who was father Abraham, with an assist from Robert Oglesby. After about an hour of songs, skits, and good times praising God, we were dismissed to our class time of about two hours.
Our tables were organized for our centers and our girls were divided into four groups. We began, however, with me telling them the story of John 9 about the blindman to help them think about what it would be like to not be able to see. We used this to partially tell the story, partially to give them some fun experiences, and also to get name tags on the front and back of the little girls in our casa.. This actually went much more smoothly than I anticipated and got us launched into our centers. With many hands on activities to experienced and share in learning discovery about the gift of sight, the morning flew by. We were soon trying to finish up with the final big event of our morning with the girls of Casa Susanna: making play glasses and putting them on for our bubble parade back to the casa. It was expectedly chaotic, but precious and about perfect for them.
After a lunch snack, i prepared and visited with our SJS friends. SJS is short for “Sharing Jesus’ Story”. We were blessed with many great readers though the afternoon. I read with four, Donna with two, others with numbers from 10, the Oglesbys read with seven. Others had 1 to 4 readers and everyone seemed most blessed by the day.
Pray for us, and please be blessed!