"How do you do this every summer? There's too much oxygen here--I can't breath. I need Instagram or something."

This week I'm back at my favorite place in the world with all of the HSJH 7th graders. Once a year, we get to take a field trip to Tecumseh. Our school is so big that we take 1/2 the kids Monday-Wednesday and then the second 1/2 Wednesday-Thursday. Each crew comes with about 50 parents, 10 teachers and 54 HS counselors. It's a party to say the least.

We use baby food jars to collect water samples at the lake. Then the groups look at the lake water under a microscope. We needed more baby food jars so I made a Wal-Mart run and picked out a range of flavors. Instead of just dumping all of the food out, I got this study group of kids to help me taste test each one. We agreed that peas and squash are disgusting but we love the apple blueberry and apple cherry.

One of my favorite parts of the whole week is getting to spend time with and see the HS counselors in action. I had Rachel as a student in both 7th and 8th grade. She's a wacko and I love every bit of the kid. I think her kids won the lottery by being in her group but they probably think she's insane.

On the first night of camp after dinner all of the kids and counselors are split into 4 teams to play Capture the Flag in Main Field. It's organized chaos as everyone runs around trying to get the white buckets and get them back to their own team's treasure chest.

I make laps around the field so I can see how each team is doing and see fun 7th graders like Kim and Hannah while they police the border.

One of my students told me he was surprised by how fun these counselors are. He expected them to be boring but that's the last word I would use to describe people like Rachel. She has been making me laugh since she was in 7th grade and I'm so glad she's here this week as a counselor.

Our kids work on their lessons all morning and afternoon but at night they get to run and around and go nuts. I love this opportunity to encourage them to be a little crazy.

One of my favorite parts has to be the Just Dance competition. Half of the group comes into the CAC to have 4-way dance off. For each round you can earn 1 point for the winner with the control and 2 points for the team that is the most in sync in both choreography, spirit, singing and facial expressions.

**Blog Title Honorable Mention: "The counselors are a lot different than I expected. I thought they'd be ye old pioneers."