Skip to main content

Christian English Day Camp 2011

By
I am so glad it's Friday and I can have some quiet time to reflect on the past week. It was a fun week - there was a Christian English day camp in our church. The younger kids came in the mornings and the older ones came in the afternoons. My daughter Delia was one of the campers in the morning shift and I was glad to serve as a helper. I love helping other people :)
First let me share some pics. You will see one and the same little girl in the pictures. That's my daughter ;)

Playing a game to help the kids get acquainted with the American team
The youngest group (4-6 year olds) with their favourite American young lady.

Playing soccer

More soccer :)

Watching a cartoon
First of all, I'd like to share the benefits of the camp:
1) The kids heard God's word;
2) They heard native English speakers and tried to understand them or at least get used to the rhythm of their speech and the pronunciation.
On Wednesday my daughter shared one thing with me. She said, "You know, mom, that's ok that the Americans don't speak our language. I can already understand the most important things they say." I asked her, "So what are those important things?" She answered, "They are 'yes', 'no' and 'ok'". :) It sounded very funny and at the same time very true because I saw how those little kids communicated with the American team. They understood some words, but they got the meaning of most things that grown-ups said by their gestures, facial expressions etc. And if they wanted Americans to do something with them or for them they just took somebody by the hand and showed what they wanted. What a simple and effective strategy :)

What I missed in camp was ... English teaching (it was supposed to be an English Language camp, so I kind of expected some structured approach which makes things a lot more effective and easy for students). The group that came obviously didn't do a study of teaching methods and didn't choose a method they wanted to use, so English teaching was mainly a spontaneous process (with a couple good exceptions). Which means that the positive effect of the camp on the language abilities of most children will probably be lost very fast.

But in spite of this fact, I can still say that I loved the camp! It was a great chance to change my usual routine and to serve. The team was wonderful. It was clear that they love children and love the Lord. And they shared not only their love, but also His love with the little ones.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Translation Forum Russia 2017: my report

By
A few days ago I came back from Translation Forum Russia which took place in Ufa, Bashkortostan . My daughter Delia went with me because she never visited Ufa before (neither have I) and because of the trip to the Southern Ural mountains we planned to take after the conference with a small group of colleagues. Ufa is not considered one of the primary tourist attractions of Russia, though I am convinced now that it definitely should be. Some pictures of the city (not all of the pictures are mine, some were made by the official photographer of the conference Elena Ekaterininskaya, our company CEO Fedor Kondratovich and some other colleagues): The bee is a symbol of the region as Bashkortostan produces the best honey in Russia. We saw installations shown below in different parts of the city. There were still covered because of the cold weather, but they will be full of blooming flowers as soon as the warm weather comes. The bee as we saw it That's what it...
Post a Comment
Read more

10 interesting facts about the Russian language

By
In my previous post  I promised to follow with the  interesting info about some other languages. So here are 10 facts about the Russian language which might be of interest to those who are studying it. If you would like to have this list in Russian, please contact me and I will send it to you by email. So, what do I find interesting about my native language? 1. Russian has about 500,000 words, but only 2,000-2,500 of them are used frequently. 100 most frequently used words make 20% of all written and oral speech. A high school graduate's vocabulary usually has 1,500 to 4,000 words. Those who have graduated from a higher educational institution normally have a richer vocabulary consisting of approximately  8,000 words. 2. It's compulsory for all astronauts in the international space station to learn Russian, so we can call it an international language of space :)
8 comments
Read more

Russia Day

By
Today is June 12th , one of the newest holidays here - the Day of Russia (or Russia Day ). Even though it's a national holiday, it's not as widely celebrated as other holidays, because it's relatively new and because the reason for picking this date and the origin of the holiday itself is not quite clear for most ordinary Russians. That's why I decided to make a little investigation concerning the history of the holiday. And that's what I found out: The holiday dates back to 1990 , when on June 12th the Russian parliament officially declared the sovereignty of Russia . That was a tough time for our country, the time when former Soviet republics were declaring there independence and did not want to do anything with Russia. So that was the day when our parliament oficially adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. That's the beginning of modern Russia with its emphasis on civil rights and democracy (su...
2 comments
Read more