Kaipaki School
Collecting memories to bring back to school
Our annual school camps provide rich experiences to motivate oral and written language. All the children and many of their families join us on camp, where we become involved in exciting and interesting activities, such as confidence building through challenging physical activities and monitoring predators in our native forests. Camp experiences provide great opportunities for everyone to get to know each other really well, learn new things, build children's confidence in different environments, and collect lots of memories to take back to school.
We spent a night under canvas. The children had to carry all their gear in and out of the camp site and were responsible for setting up their tents and organising food. They learnt about how fragile fresh water reserves are, and the effect that human interference in the water cycle can have on the native aquatic animals and surrounding forests. They were also involved in monitoring rat tracks and learned about the devastation that predators can cause to our native animals, birds, and forests.
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School camp experiences always provide rich language opportunities back at school. Children become engaged in discussion (forming and expressing opinions). They participate in follow-up reading, presenting, and interpreting information from graphs and maps, and in writing articles to share their experiences and ideas with the wider community through the Kaipaki Chronicle (our community newsletter). They create poetry relating to their camping experiences, and discuss and write captions to accompany camp photos, and much, much more.
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Teachers are able to use school camp experiences to draw out and explore interesting, exciting, and descriptive words with the children. Lots of brainstorming produces a much broader repertoire of words to support the children in their writing and to provide more impact in their oral and written work.
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The children were able to use their hydro-slide experiences at camp to develop and practise the structure of various writing genres. Lots of time was spent discussing and writing about the merits of the large hydro-slide and describing the technology involved in the whole operation.
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Weekly school assemblies provide excellent opportunities for children to share and celebrate each other’s writing. Older children become great role models for the younger children to aspire to in their writing. Sharing assemblies provide an audience for the children’s writing, and their oral reading abilities and confidence are increased through these experiences. All children are able to relate to the stories about camp.
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Teachers demonstrate writing processes with the younger children. They all contribute their ideas to collaborative class stories, with school camp experiences providing a wonderful context for their writing.
