Education and fun in Moroieni

The children in Ferentari at the Moroieni summer camp

August 22, 2011

The second week of August was a time for having fun and education for the 20 children from the Alternative Education Club at School no 136 in Ferentari, enrolled in the Mentorship for Life project. Between 7 and 12 august hey took part, in a summer camp at Naparis guesthouse in Moroieni (Dâmbovița county).

The camp was organised with the financial support of the Soros foundation through its Emergency Fund programme and is a part of the activities of the Alternative Education Club that is financed by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Bucharest, the Soros Foundation in Romania, the European Commission and the Roma Education Fund.. Its purpose is to support the social inclusion of young people from the ghetto and to contribute to the decrease of school dropouts, the improvement of school performance and the increase of their self esteem.

The children were under permanent supervision of our team members, a volunteer from Iași and two parents from the Ferentari community. They were involved in various activities andthey learned to work in teams by organizing an educational competition that occupied most of their time.

The summer camp at Moroieni, the second and last one in the project, aimed to stimulate the communication between children and between them and our team members, who assumed the roleof mentors for its duration.

By involving them in sports activities (archery, darts, bowling), recreational activities (educational puzzles, building and creativity games) and school lessons (rotating participation to Romanian classes, Maths  for fun, Geography or exploration), the purpose of the camp was to develop children’s social abilities and to offer them the opportunity to improve their school resultsThe purpose of the summer courses was to catch up the educational gap. Therefore, the entire camp was built on the principle of conditioning –taking part in sports and recreational activities- that were also based on stimulating mental maths and linguistic exercises- was conditioned by the active involvement in daily classes.

During the darts contest

Even though the end of a camp was a less expected moment for the children, the fact that they outran themselves, that they managed to work in teams and to stimulate each other to win the competition, was a reason for joy both for the children and for our team. But the most important benefit was that, from evening to evening, the discussions in the gazebo in front of the guesthouse, where both the children and the mentors took part, made the little ones realize what they had learned from every day’s activities and how much they could progress if they got involved in all the activities. Even more so, the conflict mediation workshop, whose purpose was to eliminate violence as a reaction in the interaction with others, had a big influence upon the relationships within the group. Therefore, at the end of the camp, the feeling that we were all part of a big team got us enthusiastic and eager to continue to apply this approach at the Alternative Education Club.

The Moroieni camp is part of the REACT campaign, implemented in Romania and Italy by Policy Center for Roma and Minorities and supported by the European Commission. REACT is a pilot awareness raising campaign that aims to stimulate the active involvement of Roma citizens and the majority in the civic life. The campaign is implemented in Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, by three NGO’s and is supported by The European Roma Grassroots Organisation (ERGO).

Photo gallery

From Moroieni to Râșnov

In the same week with the camp at Moroieni, seven children from the Alternative Education Club, enrolled in the street dance programme coordinated by the famous dance school Dance Crew, took part in a summer school at Poiana Velicului, near Râșnov (Brașov county). The children participated to educational and street dance activities and to interactive games.

More in video shot during the camp, here.

…with a few weeks stop at The Village Museum, in Bucharest

For six weeks, until August 12, “Dimitrie Gusti” Village Museum was the gathering place for children from the Alternative Education Club. They chose to spend part of their holiday, together with their teachers and coordinator craftsmen, at the creation camp “Summer on the alley”, a cultural-educational programme that aims to offer children recreational opportunities by recreating the atmosphere of traditional villages. Under the guidance of coordinator craftsmen, the children learned popular crafts in creative workshops such as: pottery, waxwork, painting-drawing, sewing-weaving, popular jewlery, dolls etc.  During the six weeks, the children got involved with a lot of enthusiasm in all the activities and proved to be creative through their results: the theatre play and the display of their works in the final exhibition.

The children at the pottery workshop

At the same time, the children enjoyed other relaxation and socialization activities: contests, shades theatre, the “Little Consumer” workshop, the “Prevention-Road Education” workshop, games, music, dance, face painting and a lot of good time.

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