Daisy Abigail's: Live from Peru: Relay Race Day

Today we had an awesome day with the kiddos. We had a day of relay races!

After lunch we split into three teams...Equipo Azul (my team), Equipe Anaranjado (Noelle), and Equipo Verde (Brit). Each kid got a piece of yarn tied to their wrist to tell them which team they were on. We tried really hard to make the teams even but (little did we know at the time) they would just take off the color one of us gave them and go to another to get on the same team as their friend. I ended up with all the older boys on my team and then somehow (as I was trying to get a few of them to join other teams) they all left but one. So my team was fairly young and not the most outgoing of children...not that winning matters :P

We did five races. First was the rock and spoon run where they had to carry a rock up the hill and then back down using a spoon. Second was a potato sack race. I'm quite proud of this one since I thought of using the huge 100 lb empty rice bags we have everywhere. Third was "hot lava" where you have two pieces of paper and can only step on them to get to a certain point and back. Fourth was a math facts competition and last was leap frog.

None of these went quite according to plan. It's hard with such a big age range because some kids just can't do certain things. Little kids can not, for the life of them, keep a rock on a spoon and walk at even a moderate pace. I gave up on having them go back to the beginning if they dropped it. My team would have had been at it all day otherwise. During the hot lava game, one boy on Brittany's team tried going every single time. She would literally grab him and throw him over her shoulder before each round so he didn't take off with the papers. Two kids on my team didn't understand they had to wait for the rest of the team for leap-frog so they just leap-frogged up the hill without the rest. As I said earlier, my team was a little young so I omitted multiplication from my math facts stack and only gave them addition. Brit and Noelle were quite surprised when my team had done twice as many flashcards as theirs. Hey, I wanted my team to win at least one game! They needed an ego boost!!

We didn't win overall but I think they had fun. It took some coaxing for a few of mine to participate in each game but most of them did. We're hoping to make relay day a weekly or bi-weekly thing. We even made trophies! Well, they're in the process of being beautified. I'll do that tomorrow.