General Objectives
The training planning weekend is a TECS camp preparation meeting that takes place every year in May. We gather together all year round TECS Camp employees, plus the Directors of the camps for 2010 plus management staff who are based in Spain. In total usually around 25 people attend the meeting with representatives from all TECS Camps as well as Central Office management staff involved in year round planning. Apart from the obvious objective of bringing together our management staff to create a great team bound, we also set each camp different objectives to either create new programmes (educational, teaching or activity for example) for their camps or write up or improve training sessions for staff training. Every year the training planning weekend makes exciting in-roads in camp programming and helps keep TECS at forefront of summer camp innovation and quality.
2010 Sessions
Family Camp: The creation of the i-book for Juniors.
The i-book is designed to be a booklet for the Junior age group aimed to add extra focus to their camp experience through helping develop in individual responsibility and provide some extra focus for English learning. It is a cross between the welfare focus of the Happy Passport for Sophomores and responsibility and personal development focus of the Young Achievers Award for the Anglos in Little Village. The team worked on designing the booklet and also working out how to logistically integrate it into the camp programme. Their hard work definitely reaped success as we confident we know have an educational booklet for Juniors which will be as successful as the Happy Passport has been for Sophomores.
Sports Camp: Intercamp Comp. Development
The Sports Camp team worked on designing a new format for our intercamp competition. A task we deemed necessary due to the fact that the intercamp this year will involve 4 different camps for the Junior age group and 3 for the Seniors. In the case of the Juniors this could involve around 300 children competing in different competitions with the event managed and overseen by around 40 staff, therefore it is easy to see it will be a massive event in need of good planning! The team especially worked on making the event more than just a sports competition, striving to add in non-sporting activities like music, art and English competition to name a few without of course removing any of the traditional sports competitions. They also made up control documents to manage the sign up of campers to events to ensure that as many campers as possible would be competing in events at the same time so there wouldn’t be campers sitting around waiting for their event to take place. Again the team achieved all their objectives and we feel confident we can run an excellent new and revised intercamp competition in 2010.
Little Village: The Learner Card
The learner card is an innovative addition to English learning in Little Village. The idea is that on day one the campers are level tested with a new TECS Level Test (designed at the Review Weekend) and weakness in their oral ability and understanding are identified. Then the teacher will asses these weaker areas in the first few days of class before setting improvement objectives for the learning card based upon these weaker areas. For example a fictitious student Pablo has excellent fluency but struggles with English pronunciation. His teacher identified this as his weakness and set him a small pronunciation area to practice every day, for example he was told on Wednesday to practice using as many English words beginning with “S” – i.e. Spaghetti, and was prepped to make a conscious effort to avoid slipping into the pronunciation error of starting these words “es” (“es”paghetti!) as part of his learner card. During the course of the day Pablo had to show that he was practicing this new pronunciation improvement on as many occasions as possible and then in the evening would have to demonstrate again to his teacher that he had improved and then if he had done so he would be given a tick. The learner card would be extra page or two in the Young Achievers booklet and would contribute to student’s progress in this programme by allowing them to move on to the next level in some cases, most notably the “English improvement” section.
Star Camp: Training to Staff in Guided Independence Programme
Star Camp with its innovative and unique “guided independence” programme where campers are given more independence (i.e to choose within a timeframe when to come to breakfast) and privileges (i.e. carrying their own mobiles) of course needs excellent training sessions to make sure that both staff and campers understand, see the benefits of and then ultimately respect the programme. The Star Camp management team therefore got together with the objective of fine-tuning our existing training session on guided independence so staff understood fully how different things operate in Star Camp, for example how discipline is dealt with in a more adult like way where staff address the campers as equals. The group made excellent in-roads into this training session, adding interesting role play into it to give visual examples of how staff-camper bond should be. We also plan to further develop and adapt this training session so parts of it can be used with the campers in the Arrivals Day Introduction.
Magic Village: House Competitions and English Star Awards
Magic Village worked on deciding the House Competitions and English Star Awards for the two new Natural English packs. Careful thought had to be put into each so they connected effectively with the language points of each day (as in the Natural English Files) as this is one of the key objectives of Natural English to make sure the natural English learned in the class is given a context to be used out of it. For example the target theme in sessions (class) in the morning on Wednesday day 3 of pack 2, was should and shouldn’t introduced in the context of natural disasters so the star challenge was to write down in their English Star booklet what three things they should or shouldn’t do in an earthquake. The House Competition on this day was a game which involved campers running to signs saying what things they should do if a “natural disaster” happened (the coordinator would call the type of disaster, i.e. hurricane and the campers would run to the sign saying “we should find shelter” for example).
Go! Camp: the Welfare Programme
The Go Camp management team was set the tricky task of designing a welfare programme for the camp, one which accepted and welcomed the role Spanish plays in this mixed language camp. First all they focused on creating a camper questionnaire which will be done with the campers on day one to identify some possible integration problems some campers may have on camp. Then they turned their hand to creating a welfare booklet that like the Happy Passport could help to support their campers in their welfare development on camp. Finally they developed the mid-camp report card which will be presented to parents on the parents day in this camp so that parents can have an idea of how their child is progressing in camp and play their part in helping this process. The team achieved their objective and cleverly designed an interesting welfare programme which we feel confident will help play its part in creating a great welfare support network in this camp.
Other Accompplishments
The weekend also proved a fruitful weekend for our musical talents as not only did one of the management team perform and present a new version of our famous TECS song complete actions that could be performed and sung by the campers at meal times and other chill out moments but also we set our hand to the task of creating camp chants. This proved to be a big hit with all involved and we are looking forward to teaching them to the kids and getting 100 campers to perform them on mass at the intercamp competitions.
Links to photos and chants
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