It's been a great week here at NextStep.  Kristine's been out as she is doing some short term teaching in Brunswick and we miss her a lot!  On Monday we had a nice discussion about personal safety and how we should handle ourselves if strangers talk to us.  This is something that we definitely want to continue as an ongoing discussion in the future.  We also talked about cleaning, starting with bathrooms.  We will be taking on at least the monthly cleaning of one or two of the bathrooms here at Strive and hope to see some practicing of bathroom cleaning skills going on at home as well!  We also had a fun 'price is right' type game with the living room items we found at Target last week.  A few of us got some reality checks on what things might actually cost for an apartment (Rory and Kristine included).  We had a great time volunteering at the Root Cellar on Tuesday.  In the afternoon, we took a trip over to SMCC where we met Kristine and she showed us her classroom.  We all picked up flyers on majors/subjects that interested us as well as taking a beauitful walk around the ocean campus!  On Wednesday we did a neat "Salty Watercolors" art project that let us experiment with mixing and blending primary colors.  In the afternoon, we did a lot of work with rounding to the nearest dollar as well as reading menus.  We also tried out some Readers' Theatre and discovered we have some actors and actresses in the group!  Yesterday (Thrusday) we did our weekly recipe finding and grocery shopping for Friday lunch.  Erica and Tim did a wonderful job navigating the grocery store and rounding prices to the nearest dollar.  We got all the ingredients to make chicken caesar wraps or salads for today!  It was absolutely gorgeous out and in the afternoon we all took a trip over to Macworth Island.  We had a great time walking the trail, skipping rocks, finding sea glass and socializing.  Today we're going to be taking a trip over to News Channel 6 where Bill Green (of "Bill Green's Maine) will be showing us around.  We told him about our newsletter and how we are interested in finding cool stories in the community.  We're going to get to meet a lot of the news team there and we've prepared some questions that we'd like to ask them.  A few of us will also be going over to Shaw Bros. to check out all the cool equipment.  All in all, NextSteppers will have to rest up this weekend..we've had a busy week!
 The Guys and Gals walking the trail at Macworth!