Middle School Retreat

This weekend was the annual Middle School Retreat. So we went to the Isle of Wight, which is just a wee island south of England-about a 40 minute ferry ride from Portsmouth. The place we stayed at was an old Victorian house built in 1870 that has been redone as a Christian Retreat Centre. It was really beautiful and so close to the water. We walked down to the beach Saturday afternoon and it was such a nice day! The view from our rooms was so great-straight out onto the water. We had 18 middle schoolers, Brittany our helper who is on a gap year, The Serranos-a married couple with 2 middle schoolers and a 7 year old, and me and Andy. It was good fun for the most part. We played lots of fun games and talked about basic Christian disciplines. The kids were divided up into 4 teams for the weekend, to encourage them to mix up with some kids they might not otherwise, and they had to make up a team cheer for the whole weekend. I decided to use random countries for the team names, so we had Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Argentina, and Malaysia. I thought that would make the cheer making up process more fun. And it did. Yugoslavia's cheer one first place...Andy hummed "Chariots of Fire" while one girl ran in slow motion and the other kids all pointed at her one at a time saying "you go"...then they rewound and she ran backwards and then ran forwards faster and they all said together "YOU GO YOU GO SLAVIA" with their weird hand gestures as well. It was awesome. I wish you could see it as it was. Anyway, teams got points for good deeds, games, sportsmanship, memorizing verses, kissing up to the judge, and other things like that. I encouraged creativity, so whatever they could come up with was good. Argentina won in the end, barely. They cheered a lot. Malaysia was a very close second. Saturday night some kids broke a bed, so that was unfortunate. But apparently it was an easy enough repair. I gotta say though, I was embarrassed for their behavior somewhat. The staff at St. Rhadagund's probably has quite an interesting view of Americans now!! But all in all it was a good weekend!