Why are you so cold México?!

Even though the weather seems to have taken a turn to the cold side, our sessions are heating up! Today we had a really great session followed by a interesting and useful discussion with the facilitators at Casa Telmex. The kids all arrived on time so we shared the best and worst parts of our past weeks with each other while we waited for more of the facilitators to gather. Since we have so many new kids, we decided our first activity for the day should be "Walk about, Talk about". There are two cirlces: an inner and an outer, each with the same number of people. Dave, who led the activity, gave the group a topic to discuss with their partner in the opposite circle. After discussing for about a minute or two, we switched partners by rotating the outer circle and were given another topic. We think that this went really well because it gave us a chance to all get to know the new students better as well as the ones we had met on day 1. After, we went to the computer rooms to begin our blogging for the day. The students and facilitators looked up different videos on YouTube that contained messages about leadership or different types of leaders. Many of them found their videos from clips of movies or songs they knew that dealt with different aspects of leadership. We look forward to reading their blogs! When we finished the blogging activity, we ended with a final competetition between the facilitators and the students. The activity is called "Paper Tower" and each group (2 student groups and 2 facilitator groups) had to build a tower out of sheets of paper. Each group is given the same number of sheets and they must construct the tallest tower possible. There were two especially tall towers, one in the facilitators and the other in the students. We had a group discussion after about what aspects of teamwork and leadership they learned from the activity. We think that everyone learned a lot from the activity and also had a great time building their towers.

After our session with the kids was over, some of the facilitators stayed and had a great discussion about our program and how they thought it was going. We were really excited to hear that they think that the program is a great opportunity for the kids as well as the adults to learn more about teamwork and leadership in general. The facilitators were extremely kind and helped us to correct the grammar and content of our activities and curriculum that we have for this program. Thank you so much for all your help! We also decided to ask that the facilitators to volunteer to be guest mentors and help us to lead a daily activity with the kids so that they can become more comfortable with the leadership curriculum. We hope that our program is something that can be established in Casa Telmex in the future and that we can encourage those whom we have met here Tuxtla to embrace their role as a leader to others.

Tortilla Count:

Kyle: 57
Dave: 54
Lauren: 44
Taylor: 30 (finally beat YeSeul!!)
YeSeul: 29