One of the activities we did towards the end of Christmas camp on the last day was a musical treasure hunt.
My intention for this hunt was to have them find the gifts I made them in the end. That is how it worked out for Monday’s group. But then Tuesdays group came and it took a different turn. A turn that I wish I would have thought about before. But because it worked so well, I did it for the other groups following. The last clue leads to the answer “piano”. The original plan was for them to find the pirate bear gift behind my drum under the piano. But on Tuesday, right after they figured out the last clue was piano, they all started getting out their Christmas music they were going to play for each other thinking that was the “treasure”. Now why didn’t I think of that?! It was too good so I went along with it and did it for Wednesdays and Thursdays group as well and then gave them their gifts afterwards before they left to go home.
For the musical treasure hunt, I had flashcards and items hidden (not too hard) around the room. They had to answer the clue first and then go find the flashcard or item.
I am loving this whole idea of Christmas camp. I have a couple of questions about how you schedule this. Do all your Monday students come on Monday, Tuesday students on Tues, etc or what? I find that, even with only 13 students, just scheduling their private lessons for the year is a struggle. Trying to figure out additional times for their monthly class lessons is a nightmare that seems to have no solution that results in all students being able to attend any time I have set up. Someone always has something if I do it on another day and so on.
I actually let them choose what “session”. I figure surely they can come to 1 out of 4 session choices. Sometimes, I will have a student that can come on Monday the first week and then need to come on Wednesday the second week because of a school concert etc… (This happened with 3 students this year). I didn’t have a problem with this, but I had them contact the other parents in the other sessions to see if they could trade since I already had the schedule all set. It all worked out in the end.
My sessions this year were the first two… Mondays 4:30-6:30pm, Tuesdays 4-6pm, Wednesdays 4:30-6:30pm and Thursdays 4-6pm.
The reason I changed the starting time for a couple of those days is because I knew some schools let out a little later. I did have a couple that said that their child would be a little late or would have to leave a little early and that was fine.
You would have also thought that most would have chosen their regular lesson day but I would say that most actually chose a session that wasn’t on their lesson day. Another thing I do is I ask for TWO session choices or let me know if any would work. This way I can work the schedule so that one class isn’t overly full while another one hardly has any. Most of the time, I can work it out where each class has an equal amount of students in it.
Thanks for the clarification, and good thinking on letting the students choose their day. This could be useful for other non-regularly scheduled events in future. I appreciate your sharing all this with us out here.
Your welcome! 🙂