After a Saturday well spent and feeling pretty productive with the Teacher Training Camp, we came to our technical training on Tuesday feeling like there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
But sometimes that light is a train.
We had yet another camp to do and this time we had a day and a half to prepare since we would be doing it Wednesday afternoon. This time we would be returning to our practicum schools and working in our language groups to do a mini life skills camp.
So, my language group, Keith, Lucky, Jessie and I, decided to focus our activities on problem solving, mostly because we knew we could have a lot of fun with that and because we knew that the 3rd and 4th graders we would work with would want to have fun on a Wednesday afternoon near the end of the school year too.
So, we would divide the students into four groups, have an opening relay race and then each of us would host an activity that would work on problem solving. After each activity, they would choose a pile of materials that they would later use to construct a container for an egg drop. (We had two and a half hours for all of this. And we did all of our directions in Thai.)
Keith had the kids figure out a way to get different sized water balloons across the length of the field, making sure that everyone touched the balloon once and when holding the balloon you couldn’t move. Jessie had the students pair up, one was blindfolded and the other had to navigate their partner through a “minefield,” and then switch. Lucky had the students do a human knot. I had the students cross a river, using a limited number of magic rocks that had to be touched at all times and everyone had to get across together. The kids seemed to really enjoy all of the activities.
Seeing their creativity when it came to making the egg drop container was really awesome. Three out of the four groups came up with an intact egg. The other group, we think smashed their egg when they were packaging it because they were overly excited.
Doing the debrief at the end with the kids was really difficult, since we had to do it in Thai and our language skills were really minimal. But, they seemed to get it and there were lots of smiles at the end.