What do you call a cow that researches brains?

A moo-roscientist!

We started off today with a discussion of the rules governing PDAs amongst the little nerdlets. The highlight was definitely when the site director said, "There's nothing worse than dirty dancing when you're uncoordinated and awkward, but trust me you will see plenty of it." I feel this is one aspect of this summer that living in EC has prepared me for very nicely...

In the afternoon we signed up for what committees we'll be on for the session. We each have to be on the planning committee for one ongoing activity and one super special weekend activity. My ongoing activity is the Friday night dances (and awkward dancing therein) and my weekend activity is the "Game Show Marathon" we're having this Saturday afternoon. It will entail having the kids go from station to station participating in their favorite game shows, from "Jeopardy" to "The Price is Right" to "Family Feud," and competing for prizes. It looks like it will be a lot of work, but at least I'll get it out of the way early. We also had to sign up for our first week of daily activities. Each RA is responsible for holding two one-hour activities a day five days a week, so that's thirty activities per three week session! I had a pretty hard time coming up with enough for this week, I don't know what I'm going to do for the next two. Some of the activities I'll be running this week are charades, ridiculous pictionary (thanks, 5W!), bubble blowing, cloudwatching, and 60s music appreciation. Any ideas for the rest of the session would be really appreciated (as long as they're appropriate for 12-15 year olds)!

The last thing we did today was pick groups for the skits we have to perform for the kids at the opening ceremony tomorrow. Each skit is about some regulation, so it's basically a plot to teach the kids all the CTY rules while they think they're being entertained. My two groupmates and I will be performing a skit entitled "Lanyards Are My Everything" about the importance of always wearing your official CTY lanyard (with your ID and room key attached) and the dire consequences of swinging said lanyard. I don't want to give away too much of our inspired script, but lets just say it involves a CTY student named Charlie Brown and a Lanyard-Eating-Tree (since that's where the lanyards tend to end up when the kids swing them around). Hopefully the kids won't figure out that our skit title is also an acronym for something...

They gave us most of the night off to finish up our door decs and decorate our halls. I ended up putting each girl's name on a construction paper Erlenmeyer flask with little hole-punch "bubbles" in it, but I'm afraid they look a little more like dresses than glassware...

I also lined the hallway with a bunch of cheesey jokes about brains since I figured by the end of three weeks of neuroscience they'll be able to appreciate them. The biomedical science girls will just have to deal.

My last assignment was to make a spot with all the information the kids will need to know about being here (schedules, maps, daily activities, etc...). At first I was very ambitious and was going to make it some sort of crazy lab bench theme, but after it took two hours for me to cut out all the neuroscience jokes, back them with construction paper and put them on the walls, I ended up going with the lazy approach instead (if it looks a little funny it's because the wall is curved).

I'm really excited about the kids getting here tomorrow morning. We've spent the past 72 hours getting ready for them, and now I want them to be here to participate in my activities and laugh at my bad jokes! I'm a little nervous that I'll end up with a really annoying girl or a clique of mean girls on my hall, but I'm optimistic that the next six weeks are going to be really fun.

Anyways, I better wrap up because it's just about time for the SRA to inspect my hall. I hope my ambiguous door decs and bad puns pass muster!