January 21st, 2025

We started our morning early again today. Some of us set up for breakfast, and some of our group left for Walmart to pick up some stuff for donations. We left for LifeWise to be ready for the daycare students for 10am.  Our service activity for today was playing with children that attend the daycare connected to LifeWise. We all had lots of fun and so did the kids. We planned many activities like drawing, puzzles, a ball pit, obstacle course, shadow puppet show, and a parachute game. It was very fun to hangout with all the kids.

After the kids left, we had lunch which was the same as yesterday but with a twist! Mr. Berendes made some awesome quesadillas with leftover taco meat from last night. Then, we went back to LifeWise and had our learning session. We talked about food access in the St. Louis area and learned about food stamps (or SNAP). The conversations we had were heavy, but necessary to have us realize that food stamps really help the people who need it. This lead to us creating a meal plan for a week to try and stay within a $160 budget.  We then went to a grocery store and tried to find food to stay within our budget of $160.  Each group had different restrictions like gluten free/peanut free or your water isn't safe to drink (which led us to budget for buying extra water). This put it in perspective the struggle people in poverty struggle with when needing to feed their family. After our fun day at LifeWise we had a fun night going mini golfing, laughing and hanging out (Mr. B was very confident that he would win, but of course he lost). We came home and had pasta for dinner which was made by Lorelei, Sophia and Ahliyah. After dinner we had a reflection of our day and we had to answer some questions that the teachers gave us.  Every night the  teachers give us an hour to all hangout without them (they are obviously still in the house with us, they just give us our space) We tell stories, play games, and make shadow puppets. 

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