The Biosphere

So as most of you know, I work at a school age program on Ramstein AFB. I'm going to try to describe our program a bit. There are around 200 kids we are in charge of on any given day. The kids are divided up by age groups into different rooms, and each of those rooms is named after a color. Kids aged 5 through 2nd grade are called "primary" kids and don't interact with the older kids.

I work with the older kids - who start at 2nd graders and go up to 10-11 year olds - the older kids are called "secondary" kids. Secondary kids are split up into four different rooms: Turquoise, Purple, Lime and Yellow. There are about 24 kids for each of these rooms as well as one Lead Counselor and one "Summer Intern." I am the Lead Counselor in charge of Yellow Room, and my kids range from 8-11 years old.

Okay - now that you have some understanding of what I'm talking about (*hopefully) - I'll tell you about our little excursion. Yellow Room and Lime Room went on a field trip today to the Biosphere (basically a glorified nature park/nature center). The kids had a good time and it was nice to be outside

In the photo above, we are all about 40 feet off the ground, working our way through rope bridges that span the tree tops.

Much to the kids' delight, the rope bridges ended in a massive curly slide. Ms. Megan had the privilege of taking 3 -4 terrified children back down a set of "escape" stairs instead.

Here is about half of my "class" at the bottom of the slide, waiting for the others to slide down.

The picture above shows the progression of the field trip. By 2:30 pm, all the kids were hot, tired and grumpy. Ms. Megan's the only one still smiling.

Here we are on the way back to the bus, where most of the kids promptly fell asleep.