An 8-Year-Old’s View of the Resort Community Rooms by Ava Wells

I am a typical 8-year-old girl- I like doing arts, crafts, singing and dancing. I love the community rooms as there are a lot of arts and crafts at all the community halls, such as colouring and light box sketching Disney characters. In this activity, you choose a character picture and get a piece of paper; you put the light box on, put the picture on the light box and then the paper on top. The light shines through and you can sketch the outline of the character. On one piece of paper, I drew Mickey, Minnie and Goofy, I took this to the parks when we met the characters and they all signed it for me, my brother did the same. I’m going frame this for my bedroom.

During our epic summer (we went to Jambo House, Boardwalk and Old Key West over 4 weeks), we visited the four different community rooms in the resorts we stayed, including both rooms at Animal Kingdom Lodge: Jambo and Kidani. On a previous visit, I met a great cast member called Skylar, who works at the Kidani and Jambo house community rooms and poolside activities. I still write to her now but only got to visit her once during our visit this year.

My favourite of the community rooms was the one at Boardwalk, it had lots of games and activities inside and out, including the light box art. The Boardwalk was the best because the cast members were very friendly; it had a Nintendo Switch and an X-box to play on with some good games; there was a free air-hockey table, foosball table to play on inside and outside there was a pool table and bean-bag toss game; there were also a couple of arcade machine to play on for free too. There is a large comfy sofa and TV which they put films on. The Boardwalk community hall is next to the small quiet pool, on the DVC side of the resort near the path to Hollywood Studios.

At all of the community rooms, you are meant to be at least 12 to go in without an adult; however, at Boardwalk they didn’t mind that I could go in with just Ben this is because I behaved well. I wasn’t allowed into any of the other resort rooms though with just Ben.

Old Key West’s community room has a big comfy sofa and TV to play DVD’s, there is a pool table, some colouring activities, Nintendo Switch and X-box and the light box. You can borrow DVDs to take back to your room for 24 hours as there are DVD players in the rooms. Also from the community room you can rent the bikes to take around the resort. The staff here were mostly friendly but a couple were not as welcoming as others.

At Kidani there is a pool table and foosball, they also have a game called Mancala- it is a traditional African game where you move beads and it can be quite hard at first. At Jambo house, they have used the room where Simba’s Cub House used to be. It hasn’t been open long and doesn’t have as many activities as the other community rooms but has a huge pin trading board, they do have a lot of X-box consoles and a bead making activity that other rooms don’t.

At all of the community rooms you can buy a piece of pottery (such as butterfly, flowers, plates, bowls, cups) and paint it with different colours to decorate it. You can also borrow board games to take back to your room. They change the activities that you can do there each day, although there are lots that you have to pay extra for such as pottery, tie-dye t-shirts, etc. At most of the community rooms there were the light boxes to draw with. The cast members at the community rooms are usually very nice and they hold campfires most nights with free marshmallows for toasting.

I think the community rooms are amazingly great and fantastic. They are all worth going to and seeing what there is to do. It does get very busy in the rooms when there is a storm and the pools close, this is a good time to borrow a game or DVD to take to your room. The Boardwalk got the busiest when it rained. I am looking forward to going back to them when we go back for Christmas.