February–Scout Camp

Scout Camp ended up covering most of two weeks. The 4^th – 6^th graders went away to an overnight camp for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of one week while the 1^st – 3^rd graders stayed home. Then the 1^st – 3^rd graders had a day camp at school for Wednesday and Thursday of the next week while the 4^th – 6^th graders stayed home. Friday of the last week was a holiday for everyone.

Kru Meow invited me to come stay with her at the overnight, but Gary and I decided I couldn’t afford to spend those two days away from school preparations. The students told me a few stories the next week of what they did.

At the end of that week I participated in the first day of camp for the 1^st – 3^rd graders.

That day they went on a trek in groups of about 7 -8. They went out to follow the arrows and find the route on their own. The smallest student in the school led the first group,

across the parking lot, out the school gate, and up the street.

After the groups took off, some of the teachers took off in another direction. They set up stations for the

students to do things at different points along the way. The Scoutmaster, Kru Ew, thought this

challenge was pretty funny. The rubber bands had something to do with the group collecting what was with them. They were all gone by the time we finished up with the last group so I didn’t see them actually collect them. There they were at the reporting station, though.

I ended up at the “senses” station. They had the students try smelling and touching things

blindfolded. They even had them sense things that weren’t there (Look out! You need to jump here!). Then they took off the blindfolds to let me show the students some optical illusions. That didn’t involve speaking too much Thai. I was able to get them to count birds and fish in that one Escher

drawing, but I didn’t quite understand the instructions on the paper they needed to stare at until Meow met up with us.

At the next station they had to answer some questions about nature and animals and sing a song.

Then they had to go across this narrow dam and around the teacher standing on it. Once the whole group was across, they started off, following the arrows again.

They stopped outside Malee’s house to have lunch. First some noodles. A little later they shared bowls

of green papaya salad. At the end they helped to

make some sticky rice with sesame. Yum.

For their last station they had to wade under a stick

placed low over the water. They all got a little wet doing this. That was ok, because they could dry out while we played some English games.

First, we played “Duck, Duck, Goose”. Several of Zoe had played that game before. I don’t know if they used the English words. Then we played 4 corners. Meow had made some nice numbers for the posts in the canteen to help identify the corners. We played until one boy stood near the blindfolded boy and told him, in Thai, which number to call.

They had some watermelon, sang some songs, and

then tried out Capture the Flag. We wondered if they were going to figure out how to play it. Some teachers tried coaching them a bit. Then, suddenly, we saw a quick little 3^rd grade girl running across the center line with the other team’s flag. The other team managed to steal the flag too, just before the time to quit for the closing.

The next day they did activities around the school, including watching The Jungle Book in English on a computer, downloaded from the Internet.

:J