Dear Counselors,
First off, thank you for your time and effort this weekend. The success of this camp is due in large part to your efforts. What we would like to do this year to change things around a bit is to use the teambuilding time to have cabins work together to create a demo to be performed on Saturday evening. Your job as counselor will be to help them organize their demo, and give them feedback on putting it together, and help them to improve it. You will have approximately 75 minutes of time to work on this on Saturday afternoon, so the goal should be to plan it out in the first 30-45 minutes, and spend the remaining time practicing it. This is a competition, and the winning team gets to perform AGAIN on Sunday at graduation! Make sure the kids know this and are working on putting their best foot forward.
Some guidelines and ideas to follow:
-
Demos will be limited to 3 minutes maximum, so plan and practice accordingly.
-
Demos must involve every member of the cabins.
-
Safety is a priority. It will be your job to see to it that the practice they are doing is safe.
-
Make sure everyone is having fun!
-
Try to let the kids do as much as possible, but give them some constraints and scaffolding so that they don’t spend the time just arguing and brainstorming. Perhaps you want to give them a schedule and split them into smaller teams to plan….
-
Encourage them to work together as a team.
-
We will provide a selection of clean music that the team can choose from. I will come up with some ways to get that to you ahead of time. Most likely I will be posting the music online. If you have a small speaker that connects to your phone, that would probably be great for practice purposes.
-
Since you only have about 30-45 minutes to plan, I would urge the team to make use of WTSDA curriculum that they already know in creative ways, rather than creating completely new material. New material is fine, but I would keep it limited for time’s sake.
-
It is a good idea to mix up the material. Flying kicks, forms, weapons, and choreographed fighting are all good ideas.
-
We will make some of the other weapons being used at camp available for use during creativity.
During creativity on Saturday night, I will be asking some of the counselors to be judges of the demonstrations, so I will seek some of you out at some point Friday or Saturday for this task.
Again, thanks for your efforts! I look forward to working with you on this important weekend.
Tang Soo!
George Celona
Impact Martial Arts