Blog Tangen Project.
During this week we were given the opportunity to run activities for final grade Norwegian shouldn’t. This took place in the forest at Paulen Farm, just at of Venessla. We split into groups beforehand to organize 7 different group or team orientated activities. The Norwegian students spent one night with us, rotating through the activities during the afternoon and the next morning before they left, then the next group would arrive the following afternoon. We camped in the forest for the entire week in hammocks. This allowed us around 5 hours to ourselves to play and explore in the woods in between groups. Sadly I was very sick on Tuesday night and did not return to Camp until early Thursday morning so I missed the whole of Wednesday’s activities.
Our group consisted of Robbie Jed and myself running an activity called River Crossing. Our activity is based on the simple objective of getting the group from one side of the fake River to the other in the shortest time possible. We had set up colorful dots as rocks and provided the group with two logs that they could use to help between the rocks, except a key rule was that the log had to be secured by a teammate to promote teamwork. We offered extra challenges along the way such as the opportunity to take different routes to pick up extra equipment such as a stick and carabiner (which helps get out of the river with the rope swing exit cause) and the bonus challenge of carrying a bucket of water across to gain two extra points. At the start they were given 5 minutes planning time. This promoted communication and uncovered some group roles early in the activity. To further promote teamwork we added a bonus point which went to the team that displayed the most positive teamwork.
I felt as if the activity may have been a little childish or a little too easy for students of this age (17 to 19 year old) but to my surprise they all seem to enjoy it and participated fully. For some groups they didn’t complete a challenge in under 5 minutes which let left us with a lot of spare time to entertain them, but as all three of us have a background of camp games it was easy to keep them entertained. We often started games of helium stick and then a cognitive game such as ‘bang bang who did I shoot?’ students also enjoyed these games which worked out well for us in the end.
After returning from being sick, I decided to try running a new activity so I joined Tom and Aaron for slacklining. I really like the way that I set up this activity and how the games were progressively getting harder. I was also very impressed on how the boys shaped and created activities to become team orientated when slacklining is often a solo activity. The boys set up two slacklines, one was longer with a static rope above to hold onto, and the other was short, therefore a little easier to walk unassisted. The first three activities involved different teamwork games such as getting the whole group to stand on the line for 20 seconds or leapfrogging the whole group across to the other side. From what I witnessed all the teams worked well together, supporting and encouraging each other to complete the challenge. The final activity was for bonus points and it was to simply get one team member to walk across the short one completely solo. As this was very difficult and really completed, the boys allowed for a joke or a dance to be completed instead, for the bonus points. I thought this was a great idea as its two provided teams with the opportunity to experience success even if there was no well-balanced workers in the group.
Overall, I think boys activities were carried out very professionally but also in a relaxed manner which set a nice vibe for the camp. Tom’s and Aarons activity was definitely better in terms of time management as they never finished too early but it was also good that we able to fill in the time with other games. This week has been an awesome experience and I look forward to trying some of these games out with groups back home.