First Day of Work

We had our first day of work today! We had 32 kids present, ranging from 5 years old to 13 years old. Our activities for the day included playing some active getting-to-know-you games outside, playing math bingo, singing camp songs, and writing in journals. While I supervised math bingo and journal writing with the whole group, Braveen and Josh administered short math and reading diagnostic tests to children one at a time (a process we will continue tomorrow). By assessing their math and reading skill levels, we hope we can break off into appropriate groups next week to help them develop their math and reading skills throughout the summer.

Overall, I think today was pretty successful! The best way to judge, of course, is by the children’s attitudes. Most of the kids were enthusiastic and attentive, so at least we’re off to a good start! I think we have great campers, and I think Josh, Braveen and I make a good team. Now we will concentrate on coming up with our weekly plans and we will think carefully about how to best manage a group with such a large age range. As suggested by Robertson Scholars who worked at St. Gabriel’s in previous years, we’ve already started to enlist the help of the older campers to manage the younger ones. For example, we played math bingo in teams, with the 10 through 13 year olds paired with the younger campers. We will definitely continue to use the older kids as a resource for helping with the others.

As soon as the kids left, we started planning for tomorrow’s activities. We are going to have each camper write down goals for themselves in their journals. We want them think about what goals they have regarding the summer program, their sports/hobbies, their academics, and their future. We will also play a sentence-writing/story-telling game. In addition, we will play “elbow tag” (a variation of traditional tag) and “freeze dance” during our day, to help tire out the kids a bit. Tomorrow we think we will have at least 41 kids present! The size of the program may continue to increase as more parents come to the center to register their kids throughout the week. I’m excited for getting to know the kids better and I think this will be a great summer!

-Nina