This is Benjamin posting. I think I should do this post to start off, maybe the person with the paper recording down everything we did can add another post to stuff I missed out.
I named this blog post as sarpino's because it is what we had for lunch (the pizza) and it is the tangible thing which we brought back with us (literally) after the camp. And food is important to me, too.
Alright, so this post is going to be about the one-day camp we had planned for almost 3 weeks that happened today, 16 June 2010. I'll try and list it in chronological order, with the help of Benedict who is in a msn conversation with me right now.
I just realised that this whole portion on top has to be deleted when we file our blog for report purposes.
Looks like we're all set to go, so here's a quick insight as to what happened today.
It was a rainy start to the day but it didn't dampen our spirits. Luckily Grace Orchard isn't in Orchard, or we'd have wet games the whole day in a muddy swimming pool. Flash floods...
The day started out very simply with Ms Chan's two-hour session with the, if i am not wrong, students who were selected to perform for their opening ceremony.
I've been observing Ms Chan and her lessons very closely. She's very well versed and prepared at all times and she's really good at the piano and she knows what she's doing. I also realised that whatever terminology that she uses, the choir members actually understand them, which really goes to show that we don't have to simplify things so much even though they might have difficulties understanding at the start.
I've also noticed that her lessons are very fast-paced. Fast-paced in a sense that it's always moving and there is no gap in between segments. She doesn't even have words like "okay let us move on to ..." But her fast-paced is not those kinds when the students cannot even catch up. I think when our lessons are compared to hers, it is a bit pale, but I strongly believe that she's a paid professional and we're just students not used to teaching choir stuff when we are still in the process of learning it. That said, we have lots of areas we can improve on, starting from the pace of each activity.
Also, she individually tests the choir members and somehow the attention is still kept. Today there were about 10 students attending the extra practice session in the morning and each of them took turns to sing a tune. And the results were good. Not only did this affirm our idea that individual help is good for them, when wenye guided Terence, who has undergone puberty and has a low voice, individually, and Ms Chan commented that he was doing well. It's something interesting we can look at as well.
Towards the end of the 2hour session we moved to the Multi Purpose Hall, hereafter referred to as MPH, and what they did there was to practice voice projection for the opening ceremony, if I'm not wrong and it was our venue for the rest of the camp.
Ms Phoon and Ms Kwan ordered pizza and to our surprise it actually "fits into budget", but it was delayed for half and hour or so. So instead of having lunch before icebreakers, we had icebreakers before lunch, which proved to be a good move because people were all warmed up during lunch and were laughing and chatting a lot.
So before lunch we had icebreakers, which in the end, did not really follow the proposal because the response at the start wasn't that good, so we played a scaled down version of whacko called tap-o, first within small groups then we played as one whole choir, and Ms Phoon joined in as well and things really warmed up doing the mass tap-o. Of course we had some choir based icebreakers, like asking, "What is your name? My name is [insert name here]", and also there was splitting of groups, we had a yellow team, which was super unanimous on the part of that team, but we had a Red and Blue team because they couldn't really decide among themselves which colour they prefer, so we ended up giving them the colour they liked.
When the icebreakers began I realised that the older AM session choir members are more open, and the PM session choir members know their "seniors?" already. But still, we had to get them warmed up so that things would go on better later on.
When pizza arrived we went down for a meal and I think we all had a great time laughing chatting and playing with each other. Which was the reason why putting Icebreakers at the start was a good idea because people could start talking to each other and opening up to each other.
After Icebreakers we went back up to MPH and had a little bit of problem getting starting because we struggled with the whiteboards. We moved on with canon and tried various ways to get them to the notion of canon and even did twinkle twinkle little star in the form of a canon.
After they got used to the idea of a canon, we tried canon-ing Glory to God as one big group. The facilitators did the second part of the canon (ie we came in later) and the students were instructed to listen. Later we broke up into our teams and moved to 2 corners of the hall where we practiced the canon in the small group before facing off after about 30 minutes or so. Red and Blue team won this mini competition, and yellow team did a small forfeit.
We had a short break here before moving on to Poison Ball and Captains Ball. But at this point many of them were very tired and about 8 of them KO-ed and sat out of captains ball after poison ball, which was a little bit sad but we had no choice. Still we had lots of fun playing captains ball and poison ball, a game I might not forget so soon.
Then was the debrief.
"Was this Camp fun?"
(resoundingly) "YES!"
That probably sums up how much fun, laughter and learning we experienced in a day-camp with the choir members.
Before I close this entry, may I remind all other group members to type something out in their personal blogs for RESL on this. It's something you sure have lots to talk about :D
I'm gonna click publish post after this,
Benjamin :D
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