Teen Leader Meeting: June, 2017

OK. Here goes. You ready? First entry for the 2017 Campamento season. First I have to think of a catchy name for this year's version of the camp. The first year, 2010, I don't really think we had a name, it being the first year. Then, the second year we we had Campamento 2.0 and then Campamento 3.0 and finally, last year, changing tacks, we went with Campamento 2016. And by "we" I mean "me" since no one else really cares.  But that's soon to change!!! In the spirit of making this a more communal blog I will give you, my loyal followers, the opportunity to name this year's Campamento. Here are the options:
              A.  Campamento 5.0
              B.  Campamento 2017
              C.  C2017
              D.  Spike
              E.  Other:  __________________
Go ahead and text me your choice by the end of the month (I'm pretty sure all of my followers know my number, which tells you a lot) and I'll wait until then to decide.

In any event, this past Sunday we had an orientation meeting with all the teen leaders. We have one new teen leader this year (Emily) and the rest are returnees. We'll only have seven this year because we thought the 11 we had last year was a bit too much. So, the veteran leaders shared their views of the Campamento experience so that Emily would have an idea about what she's getting herself into. She didn't run away in fright so we must be doing something right. Kelli came by and the kids tried out a bunch of science activities/experiments that we're thinking of using this summer and gave us their feedback. This year's theme is STEAM so we'll be doing lots of engineering, science, and art activities (Probably won't be doing a lot of math so maybe we should change the acronym to STEA or EATS.)

Then we got some feedback from the leaders about the overall structure of the camp. We've been thinking about doing a "reorg" to engage the campers more since they don't seem to do so well with down time. Recreo has been hit or miss: sometimes really engaging and sometimes not so much and snack time is just a distraction. We've been thinking about making el campamento more like a traditional summer day camp with distinct periods in which students would do science, art, PE/games, literacy, etc. So, Tanya, Kelli, and I spent about an hour trying to figure out this structure. As a classroom educator it was amazing to see the different ways that each of us approached this task but I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that at the end of that hour we had a somewhat complicated plan for how this would work. After all this work, my response was, "Although this level of organization is quite appealing to me (and my compulsiveness) there's no way that it fits in with how things work in the DR" (see previous posts for details) To which, Tanya responded, "Well, we'll start with this and then try something else when it doesn't work." Typical and as always practical Dominican response (see previous posts for details).

This is too long. So, that's all for now.