Veritas Winter Activities

Over the past few months, Veritas has been introducing several new educational activities to reach out to the community. Weekly conversational English classes for teenagers and monthly film & food evenings are a few of the ongoing activities. Here are highlights from 2 activities I assisted with this winter:

Saint Nicholas Day
One of the special events was on Saint Nicholas Day, which is celebrated in Europe on Dec. 6. For the past several years, Veritas has hosted a community fair on Saint Nicholas Day. (You can click here to read my blog post about it from 2009.)

This year, instead of a community fair, Veritas invited local elementary schools & kindergartens to participate in a hand-on learning experience for children. In total, 182 children participated in the event.

At he first station, the children were captivated as they heard the true story of Saint Nicholas, a man who loved God and helped needy people. 

At the second station, the children learned 2 simple Christmas songs in English.

Upon entering the third station, the children had a group photo taken with Saint Nicholas. (This is the Veritas kindergarten class pictured below.)

As the pictures were being printed, the children decorated frames on which they would mount their photo memory with St. Nicholas.

I helped by taking and printing the photos.

Wild West Adventure

In January, Veritas hosted another new event. During the first full week of January (the 3rd week of Christmas break from school), Veritas offered a winter camp each morning. The theme was "Wild West Adventure," adapted from Word Action's Tumbleweed Gulch Vacation Bible School curriculum.

Each day, the children learned a Bible story (focusing on the Israelites in the desert), sang songs in English, played games, learned something about the American "Wild West" (usually about Native American culture), and had a craft.

I helped with the different crafts, each reflecting Native American life, including sand art, teepees made out of paper, and bead jewelry (we used plastic beads from IKEA).

On the last day of camp, the children (and helpers) were encouraged to come dressed up. Here are the cowboys:

And here are the Indians: 

You can check out more pictures from these two events (and more) on the new Veritas Facebook page: ww.facebook.com/VeritasSighisoara.