All Boys

Monday October 20, 2008

The Group: Trinity Grammar School
The age: Year 5 boys
Numbers: 3 groups of 15, 5 teachers

I’m following Alison this week. It’s good to work with / follow different leaders to get the feel for things and see how different people run things. We had Billy carting today, which the year five boys got totally into!

Trinity Grammar is a private Christian boy’s school that takes the boys on camp every year starting with year five. So it is this group’s first time at camp. Every day at 4:00 the boys have journaling time to reflect on the days activities. . . Today they were asked to write 3-6 lines and draw a picture highlighting their day. These journals are then kept by youthworks and used by the boys every year up through year 9, when they spend 5 weeks in a camp-like setting! What a neat concept! So at the end of year nine they will have five years worth of journaling from camp!

I’m finding camps are much more common here. At home I went to outdoor ed once during 6th grade for three days. Perhaps that was just my personal experience and other states do outdoor ed differently. But still, here the camp experiences seem to start at an earlier age, run for longer periods of time, and occur more frequently than once in your schooling.

I think there is a lot of value in taking students on camp more than just once in their 12 years of schooling. There is so much learning to be done at camp that could not occur inside a classroom. And when coupled with journaling and reflecting, the benefits are invaluable.

However, I can understand, having nearly been in a teacher’s shoes, the various complications involved in taking a group away on camp.
Complication #1 – personal sacrifice – the teacher must be willing to step away from their personal life for 3-5 days in order to spend non-stop time with their students.
Complication #2 – risk of falling behind – in the days of standardized state testing and yearly progress evaluations, it is difficult to cover all the content in the time provided let alone spend a week out of the classroom with little to no academics.
Complication #3 – the cost factor – most school can’t afford to send students on camp once let alone every year and parents cannot be expected to cover the costs.

These are some of the sad but true facts that stand in the way of many children missing out on the opportunity to grow and learn in a camp setting. Perhaps that is why a lot of our school are private Christian schools. Hummm. . . .