MONTHLY

ACHIEVEMENT REPORT
Quepos Community Programs, January 2013

New year, new volunteers and new plans

The GVI team in Quepos, Costa Rica has been back to work for a month now. The program started
back up on Monday 12th January with a group of 7 new volunteers, ready to get going and meet
the children.
As the school year did not start until February 6th, the first few weeks were dedicated to an
intensive Spanish course for the volunteers and summer school for the children, based out of our
Community Centre La Casa del Sol in El Cocal and the Polideportivo Boquense sports centre in
the neighboring community of Boca Vieja.
We started off the program with volunteers and children making mini-biographies of themselves,
including a self portrait, where they were from, their favorite hobby, favorite subject in school,
favorite animal and favorite sport. This was a fun way to get the children to become familiar and
comfortable with a new group of volunteers and everyone had a great time making their bio.
Our goal for summer school was to ease the children back into the school mind set and have fun
over their last few weeks of vacation. We decided that the best way to do this was to organize a
combination of English lessons, arts and crafts, and sports activities.
We started the days with a formal English lesson and then followed on with an arts activity that
utilized the same theme as the formal lesson. We then would end the day with sports and games
that wove into the play the English words learned in the morning.

For example, we did a lesson teaching the children placement words such as
IN/OUT/UNDER/BEHIND/OVER. The volunteers then set up a very elaborate obstacle course
where the children had to go in, out, over and behind various obstacles.
The kids here thrive in any kind of competition, and apparently so do the volunteers. We had a
great fun timing each other on the obstacle course and trying to beat each other and our own
personal records.
Volunteers and children alike had a great time and on our last day of summer school we decided
to go a bit crazy and played a very wet game of water balloon dodge ball a great way to end our
two weeks of summer school!
Christina Harnois- Quepos Community Programs