Day 3 - Our Community Values: Tolerance, Friendship, Respect.

Day 3 began with morning gymnastics, which was lots of fun and very different from what we usually have at school!  
Our Community Values - Tolerance, Friendship, Respect - was the main theme of the day. We shared our ideas and understanding of these values - it looks that we know quite a lot about them :) We then watched two videos: one showing that no matter how different people are, they may share the same interests and have similar goals in life; and the other one illustrating the importance of keeping your identity and sticking to your ideals and principles, regardless of what others might think of you. 

  

We also had a picture caption contest! (By the way, caption is another word that we have learned here at the camp :) Our task was to create captions for pictures which illustrated various situations of teenagers' communication and behaviour, inlcuding both kind, polite and friendly as well as unkind, impolite and unfriendly. We all voted for the best captions, and their authors received nice chocolate prizes :)

After lunch, we had a visitor -  Jelena Grigorjeva, Alumna of the US Government Programmes, who told us about her experience at a school in Montana. We learned that the children of that school were involved in a volunteering peroject - assembling wheelchairs and thus raising money for the less well-off children in Mexico. We also watched a  video about young American students volunteering in a hospital and playing with kids to make them feel better, Jelena also shared her experience of similar activities in Lithuania and told us about students who volunteer at a special needs kindergarten. Together, we discussed what voluntering is, why it is important for to do voluntary work, and what kind of voluntary work could be done by every person. At the end of her visit, Jelena invited us to play a fun game and to check what we know about life in the US. 

After dinner, we had another values related activity called "Social Theater". We prepared and performed various mini-sketches on the topic of  bullying. Each group of "actors" had to show two outcomes of a bullying situation - negative and positive. Some of us were great actors and actresses!

Making "friendship bracelets" was a nice conclusion of the day which helped us realisze once again that  being nice, polite and friendly is the key to tolerance and understanding.