Project Update

I apologize for having been gone so long in my blog postings. Since I have been gone, a great deal of things has happened. I have decided upon my project for second semester, we have held an Open Faire in which my and other members of the Open Program projects have been presented, we have held presentations to the board, and are now in a fully implemented three hour block of time in which we work on our projects, along with English and Math standards. Now this is a large amount of large scale and notable things that have happened so accordingly this blog will be far longer than those previous to it. My final plan for a project was to have a camp for ages approximately fifth to eighth grade. This camp would consist of a series of outdoor games that avoid the strictures of regular schoolyard games that aim to be in general more fun than other games. These would hopefully leave the campers wanting to go outside again and open their minds to new possibilities for fun in being outside. My personal inspiration for such a project came when I was sitting in my house and I realized how little time I had spent over the summer actually being outside and doing things that involve rigorous outdoor activities that I actually enjoyed. When I decided upon this, I informed my wonderful teacher Ms. Radostits of what I would be doing and she in turn informed me that there was not one but two other students that were considering doing camps themselves. These other two students, Allyse Ketter and Kelsey Handschuh, joined forces with me and thus the Ultimate Summer Challenge was born, now with a leadership and forensics component. With this knowledge when we heard tell of the Open Faire approaching, we joined forces to create our presentation on a triboard. Before I describe this Open Faire though, there is one other large happening in the timeline preceding this. Candice Holbrook, the Recreation Program Manager at the Oregon Park District agreed to implement our camp in their activity guide, and along with this use the Nash center as a location to hold our camp. My current supplies list can be entirely fulfilled by them as well, so it is a huge help to our camp. Now back to the Faire. This was a large scale presentation from every member of the Open Program where we invited community members and those relevant to our projects to come see what we had to present. For example, our trio invited Candice so she could see the full extent of our project and how it related to our four tenets we follow. My personal relation to the four tenets was outlined on our board and I will describe them again to you now. For independence, I myself of course will be designing the games for the camp, which also hits the creative problem solving tenet. Collaboratively I will design and coordinate the camp with Allyse and Kelsey of course. The camp itself will be cross curricular, as it combines leadership, unique games, and forensics. Along with the activities itself we also plan and are in the midst of creating a storyline for the camp, in an attempt to further interest our campers and keep them wanting to come back. In any case, the Faire went well, we had many parents and community members that others had invited who seemed very interested in our camp, and had several who gave us very good insight into flaws we may have missed. Soon after this, we presented our project to the board, though this presentation was individually done unlike the Faire. This terrified me, as I myself am not the biggest fan of presentations in general, let alone one of this magnitude. But, as it was our final for the class, I of course did the presentation. The night before, again thanks to our wonderful teacher Ms. Radostits, I and several others stayed after school and worked on our presentations until almost eight o'clock. The next day I gave the presentation, which went better than I had expected. The audience again had useful comments and gave ideas towards the camp which I had not considered. Since the presentation, as I said, a fully implemented open schedule has been put into practice. Recently, we were surprised by our teachers, who had found and organized a class in which we could spend our first three hours and use it how we need to. Along with this, we have begun our storyline and gotten two days into the creation of it, we have nearly finished a budget and list of supplies necessary for the camp, and sent out letters to various local business asking for funding. In return, we promised them a spot on our camp t-shirts, and we have since received over 600 dollars, with another possible 200 in the making. I feel that we are making good progress on our project, and I have high hopes for our final product. I will be getting back to you when we have more news of progress to report.