Hi everybody. My name is Marina and I´m going to tell you about my experience in a summer camp in Spain.
This summer I went to a immersion camp for a week in Priego de Cordoba (Andalucia), the name of the camp is "El pueblo ingles".
The organization offers a bus from Madrid to Cordoba for the people who live away. I went alone the day before by train to Madrid. When I arrive at the train station in Madrid a man from the camp went to pick me up and took me to the hotel of the organization. In the hotel there were not only English people, but people from many places like Ireland, Britain, Morocco, California, Houston, New Jersey, Canada and so on, so I was slightly scared. We had two sittings for dinner and I entered in the wrong one, but it was OK. After dinner we played some games to know each other and that was fine.
The next day we woke up early and picked up the Spanish students. The trip was almost six hours, in the bus each anglo student was with a Spanish student.
When we arrived at the place, we had lunch and rooms were assigned. In the room I was with a very nice girl from California, I was lucky because in other rooms there were 3 or 4 students and the Spanish people were together and the anglos were also together. This day was for the organization, the counselors explained the rules, the timetable, dining operation.... and the teams. The most important thing, we were 80 students, 40 Spanish and 40 anglos so we made 8 teams of different colours and our attitude added or discounted points. The most important rule was not to speak in Spanish. The first day we lost a few points, but the days passed and we lost more points.
ACTIVITIES
1. After breakfast we spent half an hour for a warm-up session, carried out everyday by different people, (you could also win extra points).
2. Everyday we had 4 hours of “One to one”. This is a activity that you have to spend 50 minutes with an anglo and then change with another anglo. It was 2 hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, but sometimes 1 hour is a joint activity with the counselors and if you participate well you will win some extra points. When we did some special activities we use 1 hour of “One to One” for preparations.
3. Group activities. Every day all the teams did different activities, and later we exposed them. Some of the activities that we had done were:
- to disguise our counselors and the best gets more points
- to protect an egg: Every team was given the same materials to protect an egg and then we had to throw the egg from a roof, and the surviving egg was the winner.
4. Free time. After lunch we had 2 hours of free time. We could go to the pool, stay in the WIFI, sleep in our houses, sing, or whatever you wanted.
Point count. We counted the points scored by each team and wrote them in a plank. The winner team had privileges during the day.
5. Free choice activities. Each counselor prepared an activity: dancing class, soccer, singing class, pool activity. and the members of the winner team were the first to choose their favourite activity.
6. Night show, after dinner those who had made any representation in the free choice activities showed it, and anyone could tell jokes or be a showman.
7. Night activities. We played games outsider like cops and robbers. Or inside, guess the songs, sound 40 songs, and every team had to guess the songs.
8. Apart from these activities, we also did other extra activities like “The Olympics”, a "market", games of chance and many more.
As you can see, I have done lots of interesting and funny things, and I´ve learnt English too.
by Marina Sanchidrián