Middle School Madness and High School Hangouts

It's been a big week at American International School! Well, really Friday was a big day! As a staff, our students are always on our hearts. Lately we have been trying organize activities to build relationships between students and between students and teachers. We have also been trying to organize discipleship groups to help our students grow spiritually. I think God is moving to bring a harvest at our school. We are on the brink of seeing something big that God is doing!

We launched our new discipleship groups for middle and high school students yesterday. It was a lot of fun and I think that we are going to continue to see a lot of students involved. We are combining the two lunch periods on Fridays so that we can have extra time to meet in discipleship groups. We started out with a few crazy games. Then one of the teachers got a student to eat from a can of dog food! She had actually switched the labels from a can of spaghetti to make a point. Just like that student believed a lie, that she was going to eat dog food, many students have been believing lies about what Christianity really is. From this we broke into small groups to discuss what the vision of these discipleship groups is and ask the students if they had any ideas of topics they would like to discuss. This first meeting was kind of a test run to see kids' interest. Then we asked each of them to make a commitment to continue coming to the groups. God is so good! Many students decided they wanted to participate. One person mentioned that students were only coming the first week because it was required, but then no one would return the following weeks. I'm glad we didn't believe that lie Satan was trying plant! I'm excited to see what God will do in the lives of our students through these discipleship groups!

This was just the start of the crazy day! After school a group of teachers and I took 15 middle school students to a mini golf course in the area. We have started planning monthly activities for the middle school students to give them opportunities to have some fun and hang out with their friends. So "Middle School Madness" started with mini golf! I couldn't let them just play mini golf, so to make it interesting I added a few extra rules to follow at certain holes. Crazy things like "putt sitting down" and "shout 'FORE' at the start of each hole" made the day interesting! The students were not excited about my additional rules at first which I found really funny. But they humored me and ended up enjoying themselves in the process! Next month we plan to organize some "Minute to Win It" games.

Christy and a couple 6th graders.

Putting sitting down. The tricky part is that we had to putt uphill!

The boys were WAY more competitive than the girls! They all wanted to beat Josiah (the P.E. teacher)!

After the Middle School Madness, Christy and I joined in the high school craziness! 18 out of the total 28 high school girls participated in a sleep over. Not much sleeping actually took place! Two of the high school teachers planned a picture/video scavenger hunt. They had to do crazy things like put all their clothes on inside out (with underwear on the outside!) and reenact a Bible story and a famous movie scene. Watching the videos and pictures on a projector was hilarious! This was followed by a crazy dance party, several movies, and some toothpaste shenanigans played on those silly enough to fall asleep first! The girls seemed to have a great time and hopefully we can continue to build relationships.