It's year two here at Northern Kentucky Reading Camp--twice as many kids, many veteran volunteers and teachers, and still no idea what to expect. That’s always how it goes when camps start, though: you plan, you plan, you pray, you plan, and then the kids show up and you just have to hope that the prayers hold up under pressure.
In addition to those prayers, flexibility is of utmost importance when running a program like Reading Camp. On paper everything can seem really great and perfectly smooth, but when you add the individual personalities of each child, things can get very complicated very quickly.
You pray and you pray and you pray.
In addition to managing the dynamics of 30 third- and fourth-graders, running a reading camp requires a healthy dose of logistic flexibility as well. At one point both our guest author and our backup activity were unable to join us as planned--but with the help of or AMAZING volunteers, we took deep breaths and remembered our mantra, prayer and flexibility!
In the end, everything worked out: the kids were visited by Patti from the Covington Library and she read them a few chapters from The Twits. She was a great reader and taught us about voice inflection and how to make reading a story out loud more interesting. She encouraged us to keep practicing our reading so that we can learn to read stories with great voice inflection!
We had some craft time when we made a bookmark for our pleasure reading stations, and then we settled in for a visit from Karie at Gigglebox Puppets! Karie taught us about how to be a puppeteer and how to tell stories with the puppets. What a blast! And even better, we now know the difference between an antagonist and a protagonist…do you?
After all that work and all that play we got to our favorite part…SWIMMING! It was nice to take a dip and be outside on this awesome day.
As part of camp tradition, we take each child’s picture the first day. Nerves are not well hidden in these pictures. Some kids smile wearily, crookedly, or not at all. But we have some kids returning this year (our veteran campers), and they are holding their heads high, showing teeth! Even more pointedly, as I was walking a group up to their centers one morning, a camper looked at me and said, “You know, I get pretty nervous the first time I do things, but it usually gets easier.”
So this is what we have to remember when the daily hiccups we encounter feel more like giant speed bumps: the confidence that these campers will depart with is remarkable; that is what will carry both us--and them--along.
Remember, don’t let a Monday get you down…Friday comes quicker than you think and soon we’ll all be veterans.
We're working hard to play hard!
-Hillie Gaither, a member of Trinity Episcopal Church in Covington, reports as a camp director at the Northern Kentucky Reading Camp.
Due to some unforeseen technical glitches, the blog postings from last week’s Reading Camps in Danville and Northern Kentucky were not posted in a timely fashion. The above post is one of a series of those belated entries from those camps.
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