For our pre-Halloween middle school mentoring session, we broke up our mentoring pairs into teams to make Halloween costumes out of everyday materials: aluminum foil, tissue paper, toilet paper, string, construction paper and markers. With some teamwork, they came up with a whole gamut of costumes! We saw a unicorn, Tarzan, a mummy, a pirate, Chipotle burritos, and even Cinderella and her fairy godmother made an appearance. Check out the photos below for their awesome costumes!
It wasn’t just fun and games though–we also had students take an interest survey to help them think about potential career paths and goals. They worked on SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant/Realistic and Time-based) goals, as well as potential roadblocks to achieving these goals. For the interest survey, we asked the following questions:
 
  • Realistic Do you like working outdoors? Do you love animals? Do you like to fix things?
  •  Investigative Do you like to solve problems and puzzles?
  • Artistic Do you love to design and create things?
  • Social Do you like helping others? Do you like working with children? Do you like to work in groups or with others?
  • Enterprising Are you “business-minded”? Do you like working with people?
  • Conventional Do you like organizing things? Do you like predictable, routine tasks and environments? 

Here at Apex we think it’s important for our youth to find their passion and cultivate their interests. Our mentees had a fruitful session doing just that!