English Camp - Day 3

Telling stories can bring people together and builds a sense of community. Monday at camp brought this out. We started our language lessons with a game of “One Word Stories.” This was a lot of fun and we came up with some crazy stories. In class, we used C.S. Lewis’ book The Horse and His Boy as our reading, and the reading for this day showed the characters listening to the back-story of one of the other characters. In preparing for the lessons, I found a great summery poem for this reading:

Thus the lady sat down to regale
Our good travelers with all of her tale
In the Calormene style
Which took up quite a while
But explained why she dressed as a male.

Throughout our lessons, there was a lot of stories and storytelling. And this trend continued even outside our lesson. The sports that day were baseball and football. Although this doesn’t sound like storytelling, I heard a lot of fun stories afterward about how things went (apparently explaining the rules of these games wasn’t simple and wasn’t well understood, ending with multiple people on the same base in the first game and general confusion in the second. Shared suffering can also bring people together and build community.). The talk I gave every night included stories from my life and the day ended with the students being asked to create stories together as part of our evening activity.

Monday and Tuesday were theater nights at camp. On Monday, the students were split into groups and given a topic and five phrases to create a sketch with. This year, the teams were asked to create shadow theater performances. After watching a short YouTube clip for inspiration, the Czech leaders performed a snippet of a scene from their play. They then had the teams spend the rest of the evening planning out their plays.

I was put on a team with my teaching partner and a handful of students from all ages and English skill levels. The Czech students are really creative and have great ideas, but for some reason they asked the Americans to do the writing and planning. I love creative writing and last year really enjoyed creating the play, but that night I felt like all my creative energy was drained. I was really tired, and so were many of the students. I was happy to add ideas and think about things, but I was dragging. After spending an hour or so talking through different ideas, I went to bed while a few of the students and my teaching partner continued working on the script. The next day would show how well we were able to work together.