Lights on Afterschool (October 28th this year) Join us!
Our "Lights on Afterschool" celebration has always been a BIG success! Many people have attended and enjoyed our refreshments and activities!
Our 2nd annual light bulb drop was the BIG event, with the children packaging used light bulbs with recycled materials to protect the bulbs during the BIG drop from about 20 feet. Materials ranged from old tissue boxes and newspaper to packing peanuts and pillow stuffing! After the fall the bulbs were unwrapped and analyzed for intact survival. Almost all survived! Emphasis on BIG also included the giant light bulb fashioned by SKIP kids prior to the event which was placed around town and at Peterborough Elementary School to garner support and invite the public to the event. Perhaps you saw it around town, maybe in front of Roy's Market where it appears in the picture above.
Along with this theme, attendees enjoyed light bulb cake and cookies made by the SKIP students. Community volunteers were thanked, other refreshments including chilies and soups ere enjoyed, and themed gift baskets were raffled off. One included 4 skip passes donated by Crotched Mountain Ski Resort, who also attended the event to show support for safe and enriching after school activities.
Also, at the event, prizes were awarded to the winners of the "What can you do with a recycled light bulb?" art contest. First prize went to a joint effort by middle school students Kayla and Natasha called "Woman who doesn't know what she wants to be for Halloween". They, along with other winners, received gift certificates to the Toadstool Bookstore.
All in all, it was a bright spot in the month, and we look forward to next year! (Save us your used light bulbs!)
Halloween
Start with a haunted library, a few homemade pumpkins, and some spoooooky decorations, and you've got a SKIP Halloween, (and maybe some disappearing children - Oh no!) I guess we better check out that haunted library - it must have a secret bookcase! Our party was great! The food was fun and healthy, mostly, and the servers were heavenly! Who needs candy? We did get a bit tied up in the end tho! Well, Halloween is over, and we are on to TURKEY STUFF!
Autumn
Native American Crafts and Village.
At the right are "buffalo skins", Owner sticks, beaded jewelry, leather jewelry, and hand staves. Do you know what the symbol on our tepee means? Have you ever played with hand staves? We have! It's a good math skills game!
Bean mosaics... and Pilgrims!
"Deck the Poles" Contest Winner
Well, here is our completed nutcracker, decorating the lamp post in front of Ocean Bank downtown. He is completely SKIP made, and entirely of recycled materials, such as a pretzel bin, an ice cream container, fun noodles, flower pots, and try to guess what his head was. Hint - it's from another holiday! From the side you can see our fun noodle lollipops and candy too! Thrilling side note - our Nutcracker won the "Festivity Award" from the Greater Peterborough Chamber of Commerce, and we received a very nice donation prize due to this!
Thank you to Robin Eichert of People Sense Consulting for sponsoring the "Festivity Prize"! She is seen here presenting SKIP Director Maria Szmauz the prize, as Jack Burnett, president of the GPCOC looks on.
The Holiday Season
Early in the season we planned our entry in the Antrim Festival of Trees. Luckily, Dunkin Donuts in town helped out with their donation of a large cardboard display that we repurposed into this lovely "all SKIP made" extravaganza.
We were thrilled to hear that it won a "committee ribbon" in the contest! Yeah us!
We played on the Polar Express, and at the North Pole...
We helped in Santa's Workshop, and a had a place to write him letters! We made cards for the soldiers. We had cocoa and cookies. We made chocolate. We made lots of holiday crafts, sang carols, and finally had some real snow to play in!
We had lots of fun getting ready for the holidays, then we buttoned up SKIP and said:
"LET THE HOLIDAYS ROLL!"
Our village included a tepee, a glowing cooking fire, furs, fish, and native foods. We also had some visiting animal (puppets) such as an owl, wolf and horse. We had a starry, moonlit night background and of course, some weaving going on. We also had a bear cave, but our bears were very friendly! And as you can see we had a visit from the pilgrims!
During Thanksgiving week special contract days we made our pumpkin and cherry pies. Yum! But best of all was the Indian Pudding. We ate it with just a bit of ice cream and it was delicious!
We talked about all we are THANKFUL FOR!
We had a snowball fight before we had snow...
We had gingerbread...and reindeer...
and a visit from Santa to fill our home made socks!
