It might be cold outside, but I’m already thinking about summer as I started meeting with our Junior Camp Team this week. This year, our team includes myself as camp director, eight adult 4-H volunteers with backgrounds in education and health care, and 43 teen camp counselors. You can check out our Team Directory on our website.
For the third year in a row, we started our training with a 6 hour workshop at Rolling Plains United Methodist Church. We are so thankful for the church’s support of our local 4-H program by allowing us to utilize their facilities at no cost.
We kicked off the morning with introductions, as we welcomed a new adult volunteer, Kevin Wagner (club volunteer for Norwich Stovetop Stitchers & Critters), and eight new teens to the mix. This year, I’m working to find ways to get some of our veteran counselors more involved in teaching and mentoring the younger counselors. I asked Lane Heil, a 5th year counselor and Freshman attending OSU-Newark and is also serving as a State FFA Officer to lead the group in team building activities. During the next hour and a half, Lane incorporated a variety of fun activities into teaching the counselors that professionalism is important in their role and it’s all about how they ACT. They discussed the importance of Accountability, Communication and Teamwork as a part of our 2018 Camp Team.
Next I taught them about the Essential Elements of Positive Youth Development and how we can ensure that these elements are present in our camping program. After some down time at lunch, we held our counselor orientation. We spent much of the afternoon brainstorming camp theme ideas. After developing three separate themes – we finally voted on our 2018 camp theme. Stay tuned for an announcement, hopefully in late January!