Fortress week 1

This week was the first week of summer JAM (Jesus and me). It was a great first week. This summer we are doing the fruits of the spirit. Every week we will be talking about love because it is the most important. The kids we are working with do not always receive love at home. This week we also learned about Joy. I am working with the preschoolers ages 3-5. They are really cute. The first day we had 8 children and the next two days we had 11. During outside time Anne has started asking me to play hide-n-seek with them. It is sweet. I count and they hide. They are not very good at hiding so I pretend to not see them and look everywhere else. They love this. Bob normally will yell and say, “We are over here.” I ignore this because the game would not be as much fun. We then go inside for some circle time where the children learn about the lesson for the day. This week we learned about our faces, bodies, and emotions, which led up to Joy. It was very interesting and the kids loved it. We drew ourselves and colored what we looked like one day, we finger painted one day to see that we were all had different finger prints, and we painted paper plates the color of our skin then found eyes, ears, noses, and mouths to make a face. Overall, I think it was a great week.

Two days this week, I got the opportunity to lead Urban Experience. For those that do not know Fortress has youth groups come in every week to help run the program and they go on some type of Urban Experience every day to learn a little about the neighborhood. The group I took went to Union Gospel Mission (the book “Same Kind of Difference As Me” was written about the mission) and got a tour. I loved this and got the idea that it would be somewhat neat to go volunteer to help feed or do something over there once a week after I finish at Fortress. I know that sounds crazy but working with homeless people is something that I enjoy. I am going to call tomorrow and see what I need to do in order to be able to volunteer.

I will end with a story. Bob is very cute and makes me laugh often. Today they were doing puzzles. Mike was doing a puzzle and dropped it as he went to put it up, Bob helped him pick it up and then told him here you go man just hold it with two hands. It was really cute. Bob has a really funny personality and often makes me laugh. <

Well, that is week one. I hope to sit down at the end of every week and write out what happened. We shall see how well that works.

**Names have been changed