Mars Hill-last day!

Mars Hill Adventure Last Day!

By Laurie Juarez on Jul 24, 2015

For our last day we got to go to one of the worksites and help paint the house and deck!  The kids had a blast :)  It was nice to meet and get to talk to a family that the church has been working with all week.  The kids also enjoyed "getting their hands dirty' :)  When we got back we made a momento to hook to our bookbags that remind us of everything we've done this week.  Each bead is a symbol of something we did or learned.   (dog - animal shelter, circle - bingo chip/retirement home, eye balls - looking for the geocaches, cross - our devotionals/Jesus, hand - helping at the food bank/building others up and a heart that says "made with love" to remind us of all the things we made for others...and that we are a child of God - "fearfully and wonderfully made"!)
We had a great week and the children have prepared a testimony to be read by Paul at the Contemporary service on Sunday.  They've learned the importance of building up others, our community, our families and ourselves.  It was a wonderful experience!
We can't wait til next year!!

Mars Hill day 4!

Mars Hill Adventure Day 4!

By Laurie Juarez on Jul 23, 2015

Day 4!


we did our devotional this morning it was so fun!
we are standing in front of the prayer cross

we are working on our tool boxes we finished them today.

this is some of our jewelry (that we made out of hardware!)

this is the end of the day we played bingo (at the retirement home) to win choclate!!!
it was a fun day! :)
BY Paul and Tommy

Mars Hill day 3

Mars Hill Adventure Day 3!

By Laurie Juarez on Jul 22, 2015

*The kids' comments are at the bottom :)  We had a great time at the Food Bank today, at the Nature Center and working on our gifts to take to the retirement center tomorrow. 

we made  the coasters for the retirement home they turned out to be really cool.  After we made the coasters we went to the food bank and we packaged cookies. and then we went to franks pizza.  then we went to the zoo we got to see alot of cool things.  After that we finally came home from a busy day but a really fun day. 
Awesome day! :) 
BY SOPHIA AND ELLA

Mars Hill day 2

Mars hill adventure day 2

By Laurie Juarez on Jul 21, 2015

(My thoughts are in black and itallic :)

We had a great day today and we'll tell you all about it

this is what we did in the animal shelter we pet the dogs and we found out are (our) favorite dogs and cats

The dogs and cats liked the toys we made them! The cat above went crazy over our catnip toy and some of the friskier dogs liked the pull toys.  The kids didn't want to leave!

we went geocaching it was a bummer cause everything was in the forest but we found two. 

These are the two geocaches we found.  Unfortunately, as they said above, two of them were deep in the woods and we weren't properly dressed.  bummer!

we had fun swimming and went down the slide and played games.

We thought it'd be funny to get them all coming out of the slide :) lol

we had a picnic to celebrate Ella's birthday. (at the shelter)
We had a dog themed celebration - complete with doggy tattoos! :)

we made pillows to send to the work sites too.  

First thing this morning we had our devotional and we talked about "Building ourselves up".  We discussed how we are all children of God and that we shouldn't say something about ourselves that we wouldn't say about someone else (ie...I'm so dumb, I'm ugly, etc).  Then we made mirrors that say - "I am a child of God!" to remind us :) 
BY TOMMY AND PAUL

Mars Hill day 2

Day 1 Build others up!

By Laurie Juarez on Jul 20, 2015

Our theme today was "Build others up"!  After role playing, reading our verse for today and reading "The Three Questions", we watched this video - Speak Life by Toby Mac.  Great song - and extremely relevant to our theme today!  The children were able to pick out the words that would build up and the words that would tear someone down.  Very cool.  Other things we did - made little "encouragement" booklets to put in the geocaches we found, decorated their "goody" bags with permanent markers and alcohol,went geocaching (see their blogpost!), started their toolboxes, made cat and dog toys to take to the shelter tomorrow, watched part of a movie and had some down time!  it was a great day!! :)
Sophia giving directions to the first geocache :)
The one we didn't find!!  hate it when I don't find the cache :-/
good hiding spot :)
making cat and dog toys!
they turned out cool :) we can't wait to go tomorrow and play with the animals!