Once Upon A Time....

  Once Upon A Time is more than the start to a great fairy tale with a happily ever after ending, it was our theme for the last day for 4-H Cloverbud day camp.  Our 5-8 years olds had the opportunity to dress up today as their favorite character.  We had a princess and teenage mutant ninja turtle as well as a bunch of characters as we worked our magic on this last day.
  After coloring and talking about what we had learned with Mrs Janice and Mrs Christy yesterday it was time to get down to the business of stories.  We started by playing a big game of telephone.  For those of you not familiar with this old fashioned sort of game it involves a verbal message being passed around in a circle by whispering in a person's ear.  Often by the time it gets to the other end it is a mangled and funny mess.  After game time we took a brief break for a snack then split into two groups to play with story cubes.  Story cubes have pictures on them the idea is to roll the nine cubes and make a story out of the pictures that are face up.  First the groups worked together to come up with one story then each camper got to roll the cubes to make their own story.  Needless to say their imaginations run wild.
  Once our creative juices were flowing we made our own fairy tale.  Each time a camper said and they had to pick another camper to continue the story.  The original Las Vegas Fairy Tale went something like this..."Once upon a time in the far away Candy Village there was a Princess and a mean, big, slobbery giant.  The giant ate all the flags in the town and he looked for the princess and then got sick.  The giant found the princess and the prince came up behind him then scared the giant out of the village.  A year latter the giant came back and the king, who had a red crown, put it on his head.  Then he told the giant to go away and never, ever come back.  Right after the giant left an uncontrollable mean red dragon showed up.  Then they shot a cannon ball and ran back in the village and the police came and asked questions to find out who shot the cannon ball.  Right after the police left everyone tried to locate the cannon ball shooter and find the princess.  They found the princess in the castle and she went outside.  She got in her car, drove to town, caught a plane, went to Las Vegas and the dragon came back.  So the princess saw a magician at a Las Vegas magic show.  She asked the magic man,  "How do you get rid of mean, red dragons?"  He said, "That's easy.  Abracadabra, Kalamazoo, let's put that mean red dragon in a zoo?"  From here to eternity there is a place called X-caliber where the dragon performs with the magic man.  the dragon is nice now because he gets to live in Las Vegas and be with people that care about him and come to visit often.  The princess went home and everyone lived happily ever after."

  After creating such a tale we had worked up an appetite and we needed some lunch.  Thanks to our volunteers Mrs Margaret and Ms Danielle we had pizza and corn.  Yum Yum!.  Then we took a little  break and got ready to hold court.  We had a few people with tickets for their behavior over the last couple of days.  The jury worked together with the judges to determine if infractions had been made and what the fine should be.  Once court was over payroll for the last day was completed and accounts were handed out.  Then it was time for shopping at the Candy village General Store.  We used our Peyton Bucks to buy everything from school supplies to toys.  It was a great shopping day and lots of fun in how to manage money.
  After taking a shopping trip it was time to work with Mrs. Tamika.  We reviewed all the cools stuff we talked about relating to my plate.  My plate is the new food guide that gives us healthy suggestions for grain, meat, vegetable, and dairy consumption.  When we got done working it was time for another treat.  We made a healthy trail mix and tried a new fruit paw paws. When we got done it was time to spend the rest of our money in the store and head home.  We said goodbye to our friends from this year and headed home to get ready for our next big adventure, heading back to school on Monday.
  We would like to give a special thank you to Jessica Drake, Margaret Crites, and Danielle Parnell who took an enormous amount of their time out of their schedules to help us execute an incredibly wonderful week of hands on fun and learning for these 5-8 year olds.  We would also like to thank our teen volunteers Megan and Al'Drique for spending their week mentoring and being role models for our youth. We have said it before that 4-H Volunteers are incredible, and each day they prove it.  Thank you for all your help!