Today was a great day at the camp! The kids were energetic (great for games) and excited about today's activities (great in general!). We started out with the cat and mouse game we learned during intern training. Each student grabs arms with another, except for two students who chase oneanother. It works a lot like musical chairs combined with tag - the kids Loved it. We chased eachother around for about half an hour, which became a fantastic warm up for the day's activities.
Next, it was on to the identity games. We started with "30 seconds of talk" where half of us listen to the other half talk about a topic for 30 seconds. The kids had some great anecdotes, and topics like "Dogs" were great (so many of our campers have pets!). "Pizza" was also a good one, I'm glad to hear that I have company when it comes to lathering my pizza with hot sauce.
Once we moved inside, it was time for reading and writing. At least so we thought... Our attempt at a brief round of "what did you do since last class" became a half-an-hour long discussion about Argentina, law school, history, and everything in between. This deviation from the plan was fantastic, and I really feel like the kids enjoyed talking about their lives (this is, after all, the "identity" week).
After our great talk, we read our text (Dr. Carsen's kid bio) and then began the writing activity. On a brief side note, the choice of this book was possibly not ideal - it had a lot of medical terms (great, but oddly specific areas of the brain and other terms that none of us had heard before), a rather grissly description of surgery, and an extra helping of god/religious talk thrown in (not that there's anything wrong with that, but it was a more major theme than any of us had expected).
The writing activities were a success! Today we had the kids outline debates and describe their interests. My table was all Yankees fans (I even admitted my sacrilidge of liking Boston), and they wrote down some great points to support their assertation that the Yankees were the best team (although I remain a Red Sox fan, some of their points are hard to turn down). Other tables focused on the perpetual Heat v. Lakers debate, an infinitely recurring topic here at the Polo Grounds.
We finished up by debating our favorite artists. The main contestants were Drake, Lil Wayne, and Eminem - not necessarily the top played on the LitWorld iPod, but a great debate topic nonetheless.
Overall, today was a great success. The only issue we ran into was the kids fading out a bit during the book, but I think that will be an easy enough fix. I look forward to seeing everyone again next Monday!
- Erik