What’s Up Fort Hope?

Well today was it, the first day of camp. After all the build up of the last two months, today was the day that we had been waiting for. All in all it was exactly what I expected. Things went somewhat smoonthly, but we definitely had some hiccoughs along the way. It would have been shocking if everything had gone perfectly according to plan. The first challenge that we dealt with was low attendance. Our first camp of the day (5-9 year olds) was, to put it lightly, sparsely attended. We had a total of 35 kids registered and despite our best efforts, only 16 of them showed up. Out of those 16, only 4 of them were in my age group, so we had a relatively sleepy morning. We are noticing that, especially with the younger kids, basic reading skills are going to be our first hurdle in getting campers to read. Many of the kids are either just starting kindergarten or just done a year or two…It looks like we’ll be spending some serious time on the alphabet!

This afternoon we had, what I would categorize as, an inspiring afternoon with the older kids. Surprisingly, unlike the low turnout of the younger kids, we received a strong turnout from this group. For the most part everyone participated in all of our activities and seemed genuinely excited to be at camp. I think the key with this group is going to be keeping everyone moving on a consistent basis. If we break up the obvious literacy moments with hidden literacy work I think that things are going to go alright. That being said, it was just the first day and well, kids are unpredictable!

I should also mention that I am unfortunately going to be reading Twilight for the second time this summer. My sister brow beat me into reading it the first time before I left and now our entire 10&11 year old class wants to read it (boys included!). Wish me luck…

In other news, I hosted an hour long radio show tonight on Eabametoong’s Radio Station. It was pretty fun I must say, and I think that I’m going to be able to do a show almost every night of the week if I want to…I probably won’t do one that frequently because people should only hear my voice so much in a day, but I might try and do 3 a week or something.

I’m also getting somewhat close to making a fairly monumental breakthrough in my life…For so long I have had no idea what I would like to do with my life. I’ve kind of been kicking around rock star, politician and teacher for a while now, but I think that I’m pretty close to settling on a somewhat different path. I’m not going to reveal it yet because I want to live with the idea for a little while longer, but I’m rather close to figuring something out.

Anyway, I’m off to bed because I need to be up early in the morning to go raid the school library for good chapter books for my 10 & 11 year olds!

–Be kind to each other and don’t fall down…