English Camp - Day 7

Day 7

Friday at camp is a long day. Most everyone is tired from a long week of having fun, playing hard and learning a new language. Everyone know it is the last day and there is an air of solemnity and finality about things.

In class, we were a little less focused than the other days. We had our standard reading and writing. We focused on modals for our grammar portion. We gave the students cards with two words written on them. They then had to use “can” or “could” to make a sentence. Some were sort of straightforward like “a penguin and a duck” and some required more thought (“a turtle and a tree”).  For our final period, we gave the students some options. They could read the last few chapters in The Horse and His Boy or chose any of the games from the week to play. It was nearly unanimous, they wanted to play Forbidden Desert again. We set up two of the tree boards and we finally won one of the games

Our final class was delayed in starting by about 20 minutes. We spend the end of the siesta time taking group photos. There were a lot of photos taken throughout the week, and this final day seemed to be shutter crazy. We gathered in the parking lot in front of Lesanka for the photo. A few people went up to the roof of the garage and another couple of people started to write in chalk the theme of the week. 

We took several pictures with different poses and then they told us to go up to the field. We walked up to the wheat field above the camp and proceeded to carefully walk out into the field. We proceeded to take another group of photos out in the field.

A selfie with the photographers from EC

When I thought we were surely done, the students were dismissed, but the leaders were asked to stay. We took yet more pictures. It was a lot of fun, but we wound up pushing things back time wise (but that’s mostly just me being a schedule driven American).

That afternoon, the sports were kickball and ultimate Frisbee. The four teams took turns playing the two games.  I joined the team I had played most of the sports with and we proceeded to continue having fun despite the score not going in our favor. The rules for the games were given in Czech, but I was mostly able to guess at their meaning. One the rules in kickball that I hadn’t guessed came as a surprise. Runners on base at the third out returned to their bases at the start of their next turn at kick. I had never heard this variation, but I could see how it helped the game along. After playing kickball for about an hour, the two groups switched and we started playing ultimate Frisbee. The rules for this game made a lot more sense to me and it was the game I had been looking forward to. I played with the team for about 20 or 30 minutes and then left a little.

I don’t know if it was the pictures or just the Friday malaise, but things kept being pushed back later and later. We eventually had dinner, and then talks. This evening was a special evening for talks. Each group was back with the person they had the first night of camp and had a chance to talk about the week. We shared our favorite parts and thoughts from the week. We had much more of an open conversation and it was one of my favorite parts of the day. The talks sort of morphed into the evening activity. Friday night at camp is a relaxed event. There was a grill going with brats, people could go up to the gathering area to see a slideshow of the pictures taken that week, others could go on a candle lit walk. The goal of the evening was to have an atmosphere for conversations and reflection with the friends made at camp. A lot of people stayed up all night, but I found my way to bed by 11:00 and fell asleep reflecting on all that had happened that week.