So I've mentioned before about my DI team. In early March we had our "competition". We weren't really compared to others due to our age group but we were still geared towards our goal as if we would be.
My team was made up of 4 second graders, 2 first graders, and 2 kindergarteners. That's a pretty wide age range when you are anywhere from 8 and a half down to just recently turned 5. Things were rocky but very fun during the preparation but as we got closer to the actual day I started to worry. I just wasn't really sure we would get it all done in time and be able to pull it off. My worries about the kids' abilities were completely unfounded, they were GREAT! Things weren't really what we were expecting at the performance site and I did not have myself together nearly as much as I wanted to but the kids were perfect. They performed better the day of than they ever had before and when it was over the judges asked questions that were answered better than I could have coached them.
Here they are performing. That's one of the judges in black. Bones, standing up, is a paleontologist. He and his fellow scientists, Kimberley and Houston, changed history by using a spray bottle filled from the waterfall to the left in the picture to bring the three dinosaurs crawling around on the floor back to life. The orange triceratops is my Bitty.
These are our two museum curators who narrated how our dinosaurs came back to life. That's Bug on the right.
After doing the skit we had put together we went on to do an Instant Challenge which is the portion where the kids go into a room and are given a problem to work together on just while they are in the room. I can't tell you about the problem we were given because it's a secret but I can tell you that we were nominated for an award for our performance in the room. That's pretty exciting. The funny thing is that I expected the kids to do much better on the spontaneous portion than they did because we worked so hard on it. I'm terribly amazingly proud of the fact that they got an award for how well they worked together. That was my main goal with these 8 kids, to teach them about DI and how to be a team. I competed in OM when I was young and it was such a big thing in my life. It's important to me to bring the same things to these kids and I feel like I did. I'm proud of me too.
Here are two of my dinosaurs waiting for the awards ceremony to start. Aren't they precious? We all had matching t-shirts that also matched with the 4 other teams from our elementary school. I think all the kids looked great in their tie dye and our school really stood out and made an impact.