How Day Camp Helps Develop Leadership
One of the most important skills we learn as we grow up is how to approach our problems in the world, and how we can solve them. As we go through adolescence, we get a lot of opportunities to discover how well we handle conflict, and how we can depend on our friends and peers to work through difficult situations.
Day camp is one of the best places to discover how we deal with these situations, because a lot of the activities at day camp can teach us a lot about how we might handle harder challenges later in life. As we enjoy camp activities, we might encounter disagreements, have to make choices, and have to work together. Through these activities, we can learn a lot about leadership, and foster good choices down the road.
At Brooks, we believe so much in these skills, that we have our own Leaders In Training program. For campers grade 8 and older, this program helps hone these skills to help create role models.
Here are just a few ways our future role models can hone their skills through the leadership program, and through summer camp activities.
Working Well With Others
At Brooks School Summer programs, our outdoor games and sports are very collaborative and exciting. This means a lot of campers with different talents and strengths can come together and find out how they can play.
A big part of leadership is understanding how everyone can work with one another and how to best become a team player. We always teach our campers that one of the most important parts of outdoor games is sportsmanship and teamwork.
The Leaders in Training program fosters this skill right off the bat, by helping campers in year 1 work alongside younger campers and foster communication.
Choosing Activities
As Brooks School Summer Programs has many daily activities and options, Our older campers have a daily choice where they select which activity they’d like to participate in. Choosing collaborative activities and having others join in is a great leadership quality, as it means our campers know how to understand what everyone wants, and make sure everyone is having fun, rather than just choosing a singular activity for themselves
Learning How to Effectively Communicate
A lot of our summer camp activities are all about completing projects together. When it comes to working together and making something great, everyone needs to effectively communicate and understand how to collaborate. This skill of learning to collaborate with a group and have everyone work together with their own unique skills is one of the best qualities of leadership.
We feel that the best leaders can create great things not because they alone have all the talent and skills, but because they work well with others and can charismatically bring people together.
Knowing Your Strengths and Weaknesses
At a certain point, we learn that we aren’t great at everything. However, we also learn that we have strengths, areas where we excel and can be our very best. Sometimes it can be hard to discover these skills and we can feel lost.
During our summer camp activities, we feel that the best leaders are those who bring out those discoveries in everyone around them.
Finding Out How Others Learn
One of the best qualities of good leadership is knowing how everyone around you learns and more specifically how everyone learns at different rates. At Brooks School Summer Programs, our activities give everyone a chance to take on a small leadership role, and experience firsthand how everyone picks up on different games at different speeds, and how everyone learns in different ways.
Taken together, all of these skills are what make for a good leader. We always emphasize that being a leader is not simply being someone “in charge”. It’s being someone people can look to and turn to for answers no matter what the situation is, and someone who knows how to talk to people and make sure their strengths are recognized. We think that such recognition is important for our campers, and love it when those skills are shown in our activities.
