This Friday we celebrated April Fool’s day. Everyone dressed up and we had a fun time playing games and fellowshipping.
For this year’s Harvest Party we decided to do a science fiction theme. The week before we carved science fiction pumpkins to display at the party. The teens made the decorations: planets and a huge AT-AT Walker made out of spray painted cardboard.
Everyone dressed up in science fiction themed costumes, all of which were very creative. It was a night of fun, laughter, skits and fellowship.
We had a few visitors from Pluto, protesting that Pluto is no longer a planet, as well as a stormtrooper and multiple aliens.
This year we decided to make our annual Harvest Party a space/science-fiction theme. With the party being only one week away, we made our pumpkin carvings space themed as well so we could use them in the decorations!
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We broke up into teams of twos and threes and started carving away. After two hours of steady scooping, cutting, and scraping, we switched off the lights and admired each other’s creations. The pumpkins are currently being stored in our walk-in refrigerator to preserve them for the party.
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Everyone was very creative this year, creating rocket ships, Yoda, Darth Vader, aliens, and a moon walking astronaut. A few people created templates before hand to help with their carving. We have scanned a few of these into PDFs for you to download and use on your own pumpkins if you’d like!
Darth Vader Template
Yoda Template
Moon Walker Template
Moon Rover Template
Lately the kids (and some of the adults) have been playing different sports after dinner and before celebration night. This past Friday’s game was football. These are some of the pictures that were taken during the game.
This year we started a new Community tradition: Celebrating the seven days of Creation. A small group, of about five of us, took the day of Creation that coincided with the week that we were in of the Easter season (which is from Easter until Pentecost). This celebration night was the Fifth day of Creation: the fish and the fowls.
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In March we held our 8th Annual Bake Off. This year it was an International Themed Bake Off. Each family picked a country to represent in their skit and desert. Some of the countries that were chosen were: Poland, France, Germany, England, Ireland, Nigeria, and Brazil. The night was filled with fun, laughter and tasty deserts.
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For Academy Night we had the students share what they had learned in their first half of the school year. The nursery children recited several poems and Bible verses. Andrew, who is in preschool, showed us how he is learning to read. Leah, who is in first grade, read to us from her reading book. The third through sixth graders played several songs for us on their recorders, and the sixth grade science class gave reports on outer space.
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We had a medieval theme for this year’s harvest party with some creative decorations including a large brick wall made out of sheets of paper and paint, two towers, and two cardboard knights. For each harvest party, we are formed into several groups ahead of time and collaborate to come up with skits. This year we had all the skits center on the theme of what our community might look like in medieval times. The various groups came up with some very funny results. The costumes this year were also very creative. Two of the children dressed up as Peter and Mr. Tumnus the faun from the Chronicles of Narnia. Certain ones also dressed up as a black knight made out of cardboard, a flying purple people eater, and various clothed persons from the middle ages.
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This celebration night was our annual pumpkin carving event! We were all assigned teams of people to work with and planned our designs ahead of time. Then, we grouped together, put our designs on our pumpkins, and started carving.
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For those too young to wield a knife or carving utensil, we set up a place to paint pumpkins instead. With glitter and lots of paint, they came up with some rather colorful pumpkins.
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After painstakingly drawing and carving our pumpkin patterns into our pumpkins, we lathered the insides with vaseline to keep them from drying out. We placed them all in a row, lit the candles, and turned out the lights. The themes were very diverse and creative this year, ranging from Star Trek aliens to cannibal pumpkins. There was also a gecko, an owl, Snoopy, Scooby Doo, and the Nintendo characters Samus Aran and Link.
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This celebration night we cleared the floor, grabbed a partner, and tried to learn how to do swing dancing! With lots of laughs and stumbling footsteps we followed the basic moves and attempted some variations. After an hour and a half, everyone had throughly enjoyed themselves but were too tired to dance the rest of the night away.
