Campamento en Monzenio

On Tuesday at the "social work" station of camp, we talked about various emotions. (Typical, right? lol) But anyway...in all seriousness, kids generally seem to use the same three words to describe how they are feeling: happy, sad, or mad. However, research has shown that if kids can expand their “emotion vocabulary”, then they will be able to better understand exactly what they are feeling and why. So we did skits demonstrating all the different emotions: celosa (jealous), aburrida (bored), cansada (tired), sorprendida (surprised), nerviosa (nervous), preocupada (worried), and so on and so forth. While this sounds very simple, our main goal was to empower kids with a larger vocabulary so that they can better express themselves.

On Wednesday at the "social work" station, we taught the kids about repect: respecting the environment, respecting their personal belongings, respecting their peers, as well as respecting their teachers and parents. Let me just say that it is incredibly difficult to teach these kinds of things in a fun "camp-ish" sort of way. We had to get real creative, but it was a lot of fun. We did a lot of skits, demonstrating the correct way to treat people, as well as relay races where the kids had to pick up trash, fold shirts and put away a deck of cards. They are very competitive, so it works really well to turn any kind of learning experience into a competition. I also noticed that no matter how competitive they got, they were ALL very meticulous about folding the shirts...it was so precious.

On Thursday at the rec station, we played a lot of futbol americano (football), papa caliente (hot potato), Simon dice (Simon says), and pata pata ganza (duck duck goose).