June 6th: Dealing with Time

 

I would say today’s camp theme was controlled chaos.  The most important lesson takeaway from today was adapting to the needs of the patrons present. I will start by saying today did not go entirely as Ms. Karen B and I planned. A lot of the chaos had to with the lack of timing from camp staff. All of our groups arrived at different times to the program, therefore some groups got 40 minutes and one group got 10 minutes. This timing chaos really created issues with the planned tent craft. The tent craft involved cutting out large triangles, pasting popsicle sticks to the triangle cut outs, and decorating the assembled tents. Therefore, to save time we just had the kids draw their own tents and decorate their drawings. This seemed to work a lot better and work better under all the varying time constraints. 

Besides the crafts, I read each group one of my three camp themed books, switching the one I did based one the age group. After reading the story, I would with the help of my supervisor pass out the craft materials (paper and colored pencils/twistable crayons). I gave the instructions on the craft and sent the kids to work. During craft time, I would slowly release kids to checkout materials at the bookmobile and send more once a group came back. We would also play iSpy and guess the object (this was the favorite game of all the kids). I had four little girls from different groups give me their tent drawings as they wanted me to have them with was so sweet.

Overall, despite the varying start times and constant adapting, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and look forward to seeing all the kids again at Summer Squires!


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