A Day in the Life of…the Seniors

I’m Jessica, a newbie to Camp Robin Hood. This summer I will be shadowing units, cabins, staff, and various activities, and giving you an inside look at what it’s like to spend summers at CRH. I hope you have as much fun as I’m having!

Age Group: Completed Grades 4-7
Section Heads: Lara (Senior Girls) and Steve (Senior Boys)
Cabins: SG-4 and SB-2
Counsellors: Brooke & Mel (SG) and Daniel & Brendon (SB)

This week I finally made it to the Senior Unit! Now the Seniors are a bit different than the rest of the units at CRH. First off, both the boys and girls are together in one unit, which makes it seem like a smaller group, and they also have the widest age span of kids at camp (ages 9-13). For the majority of the day I was with a group of preteen girls, which was really just very educational, but also made me feel older than I have all summer here at camp.

At the beginning of the summer it occurred to me very quickly that I was definitely older than most of the staff, but it wasn’t really a huge deal. And as I’ve gone and shadowed the nursery-aged, juniors and inters, the campers just felt like little kids and they looked at me as another counsellor. But when I headed over to SG-4, which is a group of girls who are going into grade 7 and 8, it was a whole other experience. I felt old!

These girls were using acronyms that made no sense to me at all. To them, boys no longer have ‘cooties.’ We compared stories about broken cell phones (I didn’t even know what a cell phone was at their age). And at some point, we even started talking about what types of summer jobs they want to have in the next few years (camp counsellors, obviously). I was also able to see how the campers and their counsellors interacted. At this age it’s much more like a friendship rather than a teacher-student type of relationship.

But back to our day, we started by making beaded bracelets and writing the next week’s Cup-o’-Love cheer as campers were arriving. If you read my Day in the Life of the Intergirls, then you know that the Senior Girls have this Cheer-Off down pat. They are currently on a role with three consecutive Cheer-Off wins, and this week’s cheer was looking to be just as solid! They have the right formula of old-school (for the judges) and today’s Top 40 (for them), and this week thing’s are getting ‘bootylicious.’

Their first activity for the day was swim, where the seniors got into their appropriate swim groups and got right into their lessons. Once again, this is an age group where the kids are fully into their lessons. It almost makes me jealous at how good they actually are. I was never put into swimming lessons as a kid so it was a long process of me just learning how to swim (float) on my own. While everyone was in the pool, I chatted up the star of the camp play as she wasn’t able to swim that day. We bonded over our love of musicals and basically became BFFs on the spot.

Once swim was over we headed back to the unit to get changed, have a snack and gossip about our camp crushes. Then it was time for Music & Drama, which I had yet to even step into the castle, and was just excited as the girls were to head over there. M&D is a magical place, mainly because I got to participate. The girls were split into two groups and myself, Lara and the M&D guys were in a third group. We had to do fairytale-themed Mad Libs and then act out the ridiculous story we had recreated. Here are the girls’ versions of Cinderella and The Three Little Pigs:

After M&D we went to Archery, which again I had never done before. The girls looked so bad a** with those bow and arrows that I knew I had to get my Katniss on. I nervously shot one arrow and quickly realized that I would definitely NOT win The Hunger Games. So I moved on to arranging this photo shoot of the girls and the head of Archery, Scott, which they were completely on board for!

Once we freed Scott from our arrows, we headed to the opposite end of camp for Nature. It was at this point that I really wished I had an odometer to know how many steps I had taken that morning alone. This is how our morning had gone so far: we started at the unit (most eastern part of the property), went to Swim (middle of camp), back to the unit, M&D (middle of camp), Archery (southeast corner), Nature (west side of camp) and then finally back to the unit for lunch. So now you know why your Seniors are completely exhausted by the time they get home.

Anyway, back to Nature. It was a jam-packed 30-minutes where we got to visit the newly-hatched baby ducks, set off our volcanoes, and got a preview of what the Seniors would be doing in next week’s Options: rockets made with various beverages and house-hold items. They were so cool that Nature had all of the girls second-guessing the Options they had already picked (Nature is on a role this year, and frankly if I were a camper I’d want to be spending all of my time there!)

We headed back to the unit for lunch, which we were more than looking forward to. We were all super hungry and just inhaled our food, allowing us to have time to talk about which girls were excited to be CIT/LITs next summer.

Next was Options, which is an opportunity that the Seniors get where they can spend a full hour at their activity of choice. It’s a great way for this older group to feel a little more in control of their schedule, and frankly allows them to experience the things that interest them the most. CRH has such an array of activities that the Seniors truly have the ‘Option’ to dabble in their interests a little longer. In fact, rather than following a specific cabin, I also chose what interested me.

First I went to Land Sports, which was the talk of the camp that week with their wheelchair basketball. It’s amazing that CRH was able to acquire enough chairs that the campers could have a true experience of what it’s like to play this sport. I heard more campers around camp talking about this activity than any other activity all summer. It was definitely an eye-opening experience for them while still having a ton of fun!

For the second half of Options I headed to The Wall, another place I hadn’t yet been to. Despite my fear of heights as a kid, this would have for sure been the activity I chose. The Wall is so neat, with a large variety of climbing options. And although I didn’t get to climb anything myself, I watched your campers turn into little monkeys. I honestly can’t even describe what I saw, which is exactly why I got this video of two Senior Boys (brothers) racing to the top of one of the climbing elements:

After Options I headed to Arts & Crafts with SB-2 where we made these cool tinfoil paintings. Since I know my mom is way over the whole art-on-the-fridge thing, I put my painting up in the office for all of the staff to enjoy!

Finally we had our last swim, which was a Free Swim where the Seniors could pretty much do anything they felt like doing: handstands, volleyball, tag, the usual fun pool activities. Once our half hour was up, we headed back to the unit to get ready for their trip home, enjoy a freezie and sort of just veg.

It was a really fantastic day with the Seniors, but I was happy to head back to the office where they don’t speak in acronyms on a regular basis.