Today during staff orientation we set up our annual Activity Skills Round Robin for the counselors. This is when Stu and Jeremy put out a piece of paper for each activity offered at camp and instruct the counselors to walk around and sign their names to the activities they can teach. Even though we hired our staff knowing their activity skills and interests, this is one last chance for them to tell us if they are a #1 (high skills and able to lead the activity), a #2 (skilled, but probably better as an assistant), or #3 (interested in helping out and learning more about it).
I walked around and counted seventy-four activity pages! I didn't even realize that we offered that many activities! It was fun to watch each counselor go to each paper and decide where (or whether) to put his/her name on it.
There was also a seventy-fifth page, titled "Other". This is where counselors could write down new activity ideas. I'm excited to see what new additions we'll have to our program this summer.
As you probably know, during the summer our campers get to pick their own activities every day -- individual choice, not group choice. That's an amazing amount of choice and our campers make the most of it, trying out lots of new activities and going back to those they like the best and/or want to learn the most about. It's one of the coolest things about our camp.
Our full staff orientation is just a little over 24 hours old and we already feel like we've been together for a long time. We've played games, taken tours of camp, talked about various age level characteristics of children, started to plan our program activities, had two bunk meetings and a campfire, learned some CK Classics like Rob-Lou-Jen, Gladiator and Ga-Ga, and lots more. It's amazing what we accomplish in a small amount of time.
It's a great staff and I think those lucky campers who will be joining us soon are going to agree with me. Well, some of the staff are playing basketball in the field house right now and others are just chilling while the head counselors, Teri and Jeremy sneak away for their meeting to pick the bunk group co-counselors. We'll find out tomorrow what they decided and continue our orientation the rest of the week.
It's an awesome week at camp. Wish you were here.
Tom
No comments:
Post a Comment