Finito

Last Thursday my group, the B&G Clubbers, successfully completed our Service Learning Project at the Boys and Girls Club of Lafayette. Our event did not go quite as we planned, but it was still a success. We had planned pumpkin carving, musical chairs, and balloon popping as well as handing out gift bags of candy. However, the only event we were able to do was the pumpkin carving. We did not expect all of the children to want to participate in that event so we had the other ones lined up just in case, but the kids loved working with the pumpkins. We ended up handing out the balloons with strings on them so the kids could carry them around instead of having the children pop them. We did, however, hand out the goody bags with candy.

The children cooperated very well with our instructions in pumpkin carving. They were to clean the pumpkins out, draw faces on them, and then give the pumpkin to a volunteer so he could carve it. The kids caught on to it and were really excited about the activity. This was a pleasant surprise for our group since we had predicted that only the boys would like the activity and that very few would want to participate. We ended up using all 30 pumpkins in our activity. Also, the children were very creative with their designs. I was impressed with how well the night went.

We ran into some problems during our activity though. We were supposed to bake the pumpkin seeds and bring them back for the kids, but we did not have enough time for that. Plus, we had to keep the kids moving and speed up the carving process because some of the children left earlier than we thought they would. A couple of parents had to wait for the volunteers to finish carving pumpkins before they could take their children home, which the parents did not like too much. Most of them were patient and understanding, however.

Even though our group was a little disorganized with this project over the semester, everything seemed to fall into place on the night of our project's execution. I was very happy with the results. And thank you, Jasmine, for helping us out at the event!

Katie Spalding