How Long To Visiting Day?: Creative Role-Playing for Training Camp Counselors

Role-playing is an easy way to create engaging, informative, and inspiring sessions during your Staff Training at the start of the summer. Unlike traditional role-playing, the situations to be covered in this session will come with two descriptions: one for the Camper (sometimes Campers), and one for the Counselor. In almost all challenging situations with campers, counselors do not know everything affecting a camper's thoughts and actions. With dual descriptions, the audience (counselors at orientation) and "Campers"(roles acted out by selected staff) will have a greater insight into what is happening, than the Counselor (a volunteer from the audience) arriving on the scene to resolve the problem. It makes the role-playing more realistic.... and entertaining. These sessions are designed to get all of your staff involved-from the 20-year veterans in leadership positions to the 17-year-old first-timers. Contained in this book are over 100 role-playing situations covering a broad range of camp situations and a step-by-step process for running the training from preparation to debriefing.

John James Hickey has worked as a writer, director, and producer in New York and Los Angeles and internationally in London at The Royal National Theatre. He has spent over 25 summers training staff and teaching film making at Camp Scatico. He is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. In his spare time he paints portraits, hikes, and plays guitar and piano. David Fleischner has not missed a summer at camp since birth, joining his parents as a director at Camp Scatico in 1984. He has done extensive volunteer work in camping, serving on the boards of the New York State Camp Directors Association (president), Surprise Lake Camp (president), the American Camp Association's New York Section, and NYCAMP (treasurer). He has written articles on camp counselors and homesickness for The New York Times and Camping Magazine. Yvette Silver is a cartoonist, art instructor and caricaturist at special events, where she has drawn over 20,000 humorous portraits. She lives in New York City with her husband, Marc, and their two sons, Lance and David.