Epic Fail

At times it has been difficult to think of new craft ideas that the kids at the orphanage would enjoy. This morning, I was hit with the inspiration to make paper plate tambourines with the kids. Since I would be walking through the balad on the way to work, I knew it would also be rather easy to pick up the necessary materials. I was right. The first store had paper plates, markers, and tape. The second had the macaroni noodles that we would use to put between two paper plates as the noise-maker. The first group of kids was already in the art room when I arrived, and they were very excited to see what was in the bag I was carrying. Coloring their plates didn't take nearly as long as I had hoped it would and soon six kids were clamoring around me yelling for me to put noodles in their plates next. That was only the beginning of the chaos. Immediately after handing the musical instruments back to the kids, they proceeded to be very 'musical' with them and the volume in the room was suddenly 120 decibels. The last time I can remember being around noise that loud is when I was running the swather last summer. Okay, so that was a bit of an exaggeration, but those homemade tambourines were extremely loud. They were so loud, that every kid on the floor could hear the racket we were making and came running to see what was going on. Some of those groups of kids were allowed to come in and make a tambourine for themselves, but fortunately other groups were kept out of the room. It didn't take very long for the other women who work in the activities department to decide to find something else for me to do. Apparently, they didn't really want kids running around with hearing-destroyers in their hands. It took them a bit longer to think of something and even longer for me to understand what they wanted me to do. Ramadan is just around the corner, so I spent the next hour and a half or so outlining Ramadan lamps on Styrofoam. Turning the kids loose on decorating those will be one of the activities in the next couple of weeks. The entire activities department seemed to breathe a sigh of relief as the last tambourine was finished and the kids were settled down doing something different. I was also relieved. I hadn't remembered those tambourines being so loud. However, as I thought about it, I decided that there were a couple factors that increased the noise level.  The first was that I was only able to find plastic plates.  Anything hitting one of those plastic plate will be much louder than if it hit a paper plate. The second possible difference is that the kids were much more liberal with how hard and often they shook the tambourine because it was something they hadn't seen before. However, this would be hard to prove and would require some extensive research on random groups of kids throughout the world. Therefore, I will now be changing my major to Tambourine Development and will focus my life studies on how children play with homemade tambourines.  Psych! That was a joke and I will not be changing my major. What I will be changing is the type of crafts I think of for the kids at the orphanage. Noisemakers were a fail, an epic fail. But I guess, if they had to fail, at least it was epic.

=)