About two weeks ago I had the opportunity to work at the English Winter Camp in Arica. This camp is sponsored by the Ministry of Education and run by the English Opens Doors program. It is an amazing week of activities, fun, games, competitions, etc….ALL in English. The goal is to encourage the students to learn and practice their English and increase their skill level through . Students apply in May and are selected based on grades, interest in English, and level of English (but I don’t think they actually test that or have an accurate level). After the 120 students are selected they are pre-organized into teams and when they arrive the first day at camp, they are assigned their team and team leaders. Our camp was rather small. There were 120 kids (although not all of them came…we had less than 100 each day), and they were divided into 6 teams. Each team had two leaders, an English Opens Doors volunteer, and a college student who is studying English at the university. I was an extra body, so I jumped around from team to team each day. I really enjoyed that because I got to work with more of the students and volunteers.
The theme for this years winter camp was My Region, My Home. The slogan was “Dare to Share.” The idea was to give the students a sense of pride of their region: Arica y Parinicota. I thought it was a great theme because not only did they spend time getting to know their region better, but they were researching in English which builds very important and meaningful vocabulary fort them. The first couple days of camp the students were assigned a tourism project. Each group was given a different important place in Arica or Parinicota and needed to come up with a poster, travel pamphlet, and some creative way to present their tourism site. The group I was working with got “El Morro,” which is the MOST important place in Arica. It was great because we were able to reconstruct El Morro using the materials we had, while others in the group created amazing pamphlets and a huge black and white backdrop of El Morro. The creativity I saw them using blew my mind. From the way they created little plants to put at the foot of El Morro, to using a razor to shave off pencil lead and make the shading for the black and white drawing…all constructed and made pintrest-free!
Also, the students participated in photo-scavenger hunt. This is where each group had a camera and needed to take a picture of every item on the list. Some examples: three students wearing Converse shoes, all the people with blue or green eyes (there were only 6 at the camp, but they had to find them all and get them into one picture), 12 people in the air, a volunteer eating 3 campers (optical illusion), etc…This was one of the most successful activities. Another activity was making a LipDub (which is a music video or LipSync) to the song by Maroon 5, “Moves Like Jagger.” This was a competition for all of the English Winter Camps throughout Chile. As a whole, each campsite and all of the participants had to make a music video for the song. Our camp spent ALL day preparing for this song. We broke the song into 7 parts and each group was responsible for creatively portraying their part of the song. Our camp leader, Gia, ran around with Eryn (one of the other Arica volunteers who worked so hard this last week at camp with the behind the scenes, technical, audio, complicated stuff…) instructing people on where they needed to be, at what time, etc. We only had one opportunity to record the real thing, and we had to submit it without cuts. So we practiced all day and when we felt confident and ready, we filmed it. It was a LOT of work, but a whole lot of fun! And the most exciting part is that we won the video competition!!!! Out of all the other camps, our video got voted (by judges in Santiago) for being the best! (So our prize was fried chicken and french fries for lunch on the last day…which was actually an awesome prize because all week the kids were getting tired of eating lentils, beans, and soup everyday).
The last big activity that the students put together was a talent show. The last two days of camp they were given lots of time to come up with and prepare a number for a talent show. At first it was like pulling teeth to get them to want to participate. But once they started seeing their peers practicing their dances, instruments, signing, etc. more of them came around and started revealing all the talent they were hiding. And for all of the students who still didn’t know what they wanted to do, Laura (one of the volunteers) choreographed a dance to Thriller and recruited all of those kids into that group (which ended up being a great success). Overall, the camp was a great success. It was such a joy to work with a group of kids with a various levels of English, but all possessing the determination to speak it and learn more. With Arica being such a small area, I look forward to seeing these students around the city as I go about my daily life. In just the short time we spent together, they have definitely made a great impact on experience here. Thanks to all the staff and campers from Arica Winter Camp 2012!!
Here is the link to watch our music video :)) Hopefully it works:
http://www.facebook.com/camps.mineduc?ref=ts#!/photo.php?v=10151036418641489
-
-
Caterpillar game…fun and destructive at the same time
-
-
I was a roover leader, so this was one of my teams for the week :))
-
-
Team work: trying to solve a riddle during the scavenger hunt.
-
-
Some of the Thriller Zombies!!
-
-
Our Tourism Project!
-
-
For the talent show, we nominated our boys to do a fashion show and convinced them that it was a great idea for them to let the girls apply make-up without being able to see what they were doing…it was very entertaining!
-
-
Winter camp group photo!
andraspotlight 