English and Life Skills Camp

Our group of volunteers is split into two sectors with separate technical concentrations - Youth in Development (YinD) with 29 Volunteers and Teacher Collaboration and Community Service (TCCS) with 24 volunteers. I am in the Youth in Development sector, and our goals for the next two years include working with youth in the general areas of healthy lifestyle, civic engagement, and financial responsibility. The goals of TCCS include collaborating with English teachers, improving English proficiency of the students, and developing community service projects with the school.

As part of our training, both sectors collaborated to host a day camp for two hundred sixth-grade students from various schools in our community. Camps are one of the best and most popular ways to get involved in the community. Our English and Life Skills Camp focused on teaching life skills (a subgoal of healthy lifestyle) and incorporating relevant English vocabulary. The four life skills that we taught were Positive Identity, Critical Thinking, Emotional Health, and Positive Communication. I worked in a group of three YinD volunteers and three TCCS volunteers and we focused our activity on Positive Communication. We don’t have many opportunities to interact/work with each other across sectors, so this was exciting.

This is everyone!

Our Fabulous MCs doing the intro activity

Teaching Vocabulary - Turn Left, Turn Right, Walk Forward, Walk Backwards, Stop

Our session was centered on an activity known in City Year as Silent Opera, but we called it Find the Treasure. This was one of my favorite team building activities when I was a Team Leader with City Year because it encourages teamwork and trust. The activity involves finding an object (treasure) strategically placed in the room, the participants include the seeker (one brave blindfolded team member), the speaker (who cannot see the object), and the signers (who are mute but can see the object, and can gesture/sign). We split our students into teams and had them “race” their seekers to the treasure. We used this activity to introduce the following English terms: Turn Left, Turn Right, Walk Forward, Walk Backwards, and Stop. Our take-home message was “Communication is More Than Words.” During the debrief session, the students expressed that they understood the value of nonverbal communication, and that they had to trust each other and work together to find the treasure.

The Race Begins!

Directions got confused... oops!

Found the treasure! 

Our Student Volunteers leading the debrief session

The students rotated through various activities throughout the day that touched on the four life skills, since we were also teaching English, the sessions were pretty English-centric. We explained the directions for the activities in Thai, we also demonstrated the activities for full understanding, but we owe much of our success to our super counterparts -- high school seniors who volunteered to help us out, they helped to facilitate and lead the debrief discussion as well as clarify/translate whenever necessary.

Student Volunteers being recognized :-)

 There was a lot of work and preparation leading up to this event, and we managed to pull off a very successful camp in one week. It was great learning experience for us, and I anticipate organizing similar camps when I get to my assigned site. In the future, I will have more than one week to prepare said camps, but I will face the challenge of not having several English-speaking co-planners and co-facilitators. Working with the Thai students is always great, but I really appreciated the opportunity to collaborate with the TCCS volunteers and the student volunteers.

My Group (at the end of the day)