The hardest question a parent asks us is not about the curriculum. It is some version of: what will the first few days actually be like for my child?
It is a fair question and a difficult one to answer in prose, because the honest answer is mostly about atmosphere. So here it is in photographs instead: the four things that happen first at our junior camp in the Philippines, in the order they happen. The photographs come from recent intakes rather than from one child's single week, because that is what we actually have on file.
- 1Arriving
- 2The welcome party
- 3The first day of class
- 4The first weekend
Arriving
Every junior camp starts the same way: a van pulls up, and a group of children who have mostly never met get out of it holding more luggage than they can comfortably carry. Nobody is speaking much English yet. Nobody is speaking much of anything yet. The first job is not a lesson, it is finding your room, working out where the dining hall is, and meeting the people who will be checking on you for the next few weeks.
6 more from this day are in the photo gallery.
The welcome party
This one was 7 August, for the second batch of the season. The welcome party is held early on purpose, before anyone has had time to settle into a quiet corner with the people who speak their own language. It is games, food and a lot of noise, and it does something that no first lesson can do: it gets a room full of strangers talking to each other while they are still too busy to feel self conscious about their English.
18 more from this day are in the photo gallery.
The first day of class
Then the actual reason everyone came. The first day is a level test and an introduction to the teachers, so that a child ends up in a class that fits rather than one that leaves them lost or bored. For most of them this is the first time they have sat one on one with a teacher who only speaks English, which is far less frightening in practice than it sounds in advance.
28 more from this day are in the photo gallery.
The first weekend
Bowling and billiards, photographed on 8 August. Weekends off campus are part of the program rather than a reward bolted onto it, because a child who has spent a Saturday arguing about whose turn it is has practiced more spoken English than one who spent it revising. By this point in the story, the group in the photographs is no longer a group of strangers.
23 more from this day are in the photo gallery.
What the photographs leave out
Four photographed days are not a camp. The rest of it is classes, meals, homesickness on about the third evening, the vocabulary class, and the slow business of getting better at a language, almost none of which photographs well.
If you want the shape of an ordinary day rather than the highlights, a day in the life lays it out hour by hour. If you are weighing this up as a parent rather than browsing, the guide for parents is the more useful read, and the gallery holds every photo set we have.
Ask us anything about sending your child
Tell us your child's age and roughly when you are thinking of, and we will tell you honestly what their first days would look like.
Ask Us About Junior CampYou can also read the guide for parents, look at the junior courses themselves, or see what runs through a normal term.
