NYSP Final Reflection

With today being the last day of the NYSP here at Case, we have started to really reflect on our experience here.  After the two and a half weeks participating in soccer and athletics, I spent two and a half weeks in the classroom teaching the children.  These weeks went by especially fast in the classroom, as I always felt that we didn’t have enough time to complete our lessons.  It was really challenging figuring out which lessons would be most important and therefore needed to be taught first, as well as changing the lessons for the different age groups that we had throughout the days.  We saw three groups a day, some of them aged 10-12 and some 13-16 and it this added a really nice variety to our workdays.  I really enjoyed working with the ‘little’ kids as well as learning from the ‘big’ kids.

           Working with kids every day aged 10-16 was certainly exhausting at times, but it was ultimately really rewarding for me now that I look back at my weeks here at camp.  Having spent so much time in the CMSD through our community clinicals, I’ve always been partial to working with younger children, so this camp gave me the opportunity to work with an older age-group that I didn’t have much experience working with.  I really grew to love working with the older children, as I was better apt to relate to them and it also brought back fond memories of my years in high school.  Overall, I really enjoyed my time at this camp and I feel like I taught the children a lot and I learned a lot from them as well.