Incredible Day

Hello! My name is Mary Egorova and I`m trying to be a helper. Working in the first team for 5 days I understood how it is hard to perform on the stage, to write scripts or to work in one team. Читать далее…

Today was a special day because of our trip to the Forest camp. There are a lot of interesting lessons, for example: shooting, English lesson, workshop, but the most exciting was the game ‘Capture the flag’. This game is loved by everyone because all of the participants are important. It’s like a team building which can help us in our performances. After all this lessons we had ‘stations at options’. As for me, I went to yoga station. Actually, it is a new station this summer and many of us enjoy it because you can relax and get positive emotions and thanks to Manitou, who created this station. Moreover, in the evening we gathered near the fire to sing our favorite songs together. I think that in such moments you can feel that we are one big family. After arrival, we had disco and in spite that all of us were tired everyone danced, sang and had a lot of fun.

In conclusion, this day was unforgettable and I hope that next days will be full of energy like that.

Mary Egorova, 16 y.o., Zhukovsky

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Hello! My name’s Maria Shtern; and I am the head teacher in MMC. I’d like to tell you about our extraordinary, unusual and non-formal lessons in the camp. For example, yesterday we were at the Forest Camp. It’s always a big adventure. For me personally it’s also a big challenge as we need to plan and prepare something special for the English lessons.

This year we decided to have lessons sitting on yoga mats under the pine trees in small groups to create a positive and relaxing atmosphere. The aim of the lessons was to focus on developing speaking skills, but the topics for speaking were chosen according to the level and the age of different groups of kids. For example, with smaller children we talked about famous explorers and did a project of a journey, at the other lesson we discussed natural disasters and what should be in a first aid kit in case of danger.

With stronger groups we were speaking about social problems connected with the environment, we used a case method. Case method is a teaching approach that uses decision-forcing cases to put students in the role of people who were faced with difficult decisions. It’s a very popular kind of discussions nowadays. From the point of view of teaching English it’s a very difficult exercise because people need to talk and to find a common opinion about what to do in certain circumstances and there is no clues, just like in a real life, when you have a problem and you have to overcome it but there is nobody to tell you what is right and what is wrong. But we discuss it in English. I’m a fan of case method because apart from fluency in English it develops students’ meta-linguistic skills which are important in their everyday life: communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. Altogether these are called 21 century skills. They are considered to be the key-skills for a successful personality in modern world in terms of work and family life. So for us it’s essential to build an educational program based on modern approaches in teaching.

Lessons are not the only one element of learning English in MMC. We try to create the atmosphere in the camp so that even without noticing it the kids learn as they are surrounded with English: other lessons as sport, workshop and tribe times are in English; we watch films in English during naptime, and kids can choose what they want to see; we show short videos in the topic of the day at breaks between lessons; and, of course, every day we have a new word of the day, a saying of the day and a tongue twister of the day which increase the level of vocabulary of kids. So as you can see we see our task in creating the totally English atmosphere and to apply modern and interesting ways of doing it.

Maria Shtern
The head teacher in MMC

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