Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around every once in a while you could miss it – Ferris Bueller
Sally put up a great post and video of our Stage 4 camp which is well worth looking at. Needless to say, the kids really enjoyed it. One thing that might have gone unnoticed by some of the kids was the amount of time they had for unstructured and self-organised play. There is much written about this and more recently the focus has been about its decline and the rise of organised play. If you’re interested in the importance of play and the challenges we face in providing it as a community read this – by Dr. David Whitebread from the University of Cambridge. If not, just go with the Ferris quote which sums it up perfectly.
During camp we didn’t make kids undertake activities repeatedly, or rush them. At times, they were happy to rock climb once and enjoy it. That meant each group was deciding what they wanted to do and at times they made choices not to repeat or squeeze the last drop from the activity. Less is more. The camp was happy, if a little surprised at first that we didn’t insist on second or third goes to fill time – and every time our kids made group choices about what they wanted to do.
We had a lot of ‘down time’ where they did ‘kid stuff’ and just hung out. They got up on their own, set breakfast on their own and went to bed at a reasonable time without being managed. More than one kid sat and watched the sun come up, or go down, happy to chill and enjoy the lack of wifi, mobile reception and regimes that dominate so much of our lives.
As Ferris suggested, we stopped and looked around a lot at camp! Thanks to all the parents, students and of course Sally, Lorraine, Will, Marty and Tim for their super-awesome support this year.
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