Monday, July 17, 2017

Day 1 - Welcome to the Democracy Camp!

We all came to "Dvarčėnų dvaras" in a good mood ready to make new friends and have interesting experience.


Hello everyone! This is our team from Povilas Matulionis Progymnasium.We come from Kupiškis, north-east Lithuania. Kupiškis is a small town in the midway between Ryga and Vilnius. Our school is named after forester Povilas Matulionis, so itis almost clear - we focus on NATURE. We are three girls Adelija, Kamilė, Martyna, three boys Lukas, Matas, Tautvydas and our teacher Dalia. We hope to have a great time, learn from others, make new friends, have fun and become more tolerant, confident, and improve our English. Looking forward to meeting everyone!


We are from Vilnius Santara Pre-gymnasium: Marta, Nikita, Nikolaj, Jekaterina, Vadim, Anton and our tutor Alla. Our school is situated in the heart of Vilnius. It is big - 1200 students of different cultural backgrounds study here. We are happy to be part of such an interesting team. We are happy to meet peers from Lithuania, Poland and the US in the Democracy Camp, participate in various activities which foster democratic values, gain new ideas and share ours.








Greetings to all participants of the Democracy Camp 2017 in Dvarčėnai Lithuania! Agata, Inga, Valerija, Ieva, Deivid, Robertas and teacher Rasa from Turgeliai Aistuvos Gymnasium are happy to meet all tutors and new friends at the camp. Our Gymnasium is located in the Turgeliai Village, Šalčininkai reg., 30 km from Vilnius. It is a small and cosy school of 180 students and 26 teachers.  We are very happy to be here, improve our English, learn many things about democracy, have fun and spread our experience to our community.



We are Arturas, Karolina, Margarita, Gabriela, Dina and Denis and our teacher Irina from Vilnius Gimnazium Zara, located in New Vilnia Region,the eastern part if the city. It is a big (more than 600 students), multinational school. The priorities of the school are to establish friendly, tolerant and respectful relations, understand and learn social citizen values and integrate students into adult life. At the camp, we hope we will learn about democracy, tolerance, friendship, life skills, peace and respect, which will make a valuable impact on our future cooperation and friendly relations. 





This is the Polish team: Ola Mularczyk, Agata Kołtun, Ola Czerwińska, Filip Ciołek, Norbert Tutko and Jasiek Żuk together with their teachers Beata Adasik and Marcin Paśnikowski.  We are from Gimnazjum nr 3 im. Noblistów Polskich which is part of combined schools called Zespół Szkół nr 2 w Świdniku. The school does its best to provide for the students with special needs, students gifted at English, Spanish, Maths and Sciences, as well as sports athletes. A number of teachers and students are involved in organising numerous charity events. We hope to have a great time, making friends, learning about democracy and improving our language skills. Working together we can make the world a better place.




The team of Lentvaris Motiejus Šimelionis Gymnasium from Lithuania comprises 6 students - Andrius, Aušra, Dominyka, Ieva, Kirilas, Saulius and the team leader teacher Neringa Šakinienė. Our Gymnasium was the first Lithuanian school in Lentvaris. Now being a member of UNESCO Associated Schools, we are always eager to co-operate with schools from other countries to make this world a better place for people. At the camp, we hope to learn more about democracy and how it works. We also hope to find new life-long friends and build new partnerships for our school.





We are Troy, Ryan, Tin-Tin, Emma, Amanda, and Sophie, and teachers Ann Vogel and Laryssa Schmidt. Our school, Charles Wright Academy, is located in Washington State, USA.  We are focused on getting a global education, learning at least one world language, hosting other students during the school’s Global Summit (in which the Polish school from Swidnik participates) and working toward social justice, friendships, and peace. Our school has over 300 students. Although the curriculum is rigorous and college-preparatory, teachers and students believe learning works best when there is plenty of humor and fun.  Democracy Camp certainly will provide both of those and the team from the USA is ready! 



 Hi, everyone! Greetings to all in the Democracy camp 2017 from Garliava Juozas Lukša High School, Kaunas reg.. At our school a special emphasis is placed on tolerance education and citizenship education, which we believe is the core value to a democratic society. We are Ema, Karina, Grėtė, Nojus, Augustinas and Jonas and our English teacher and class tutor Saulius. We are super excited to be here and look forward to meeting new friends, learning, communicating, collaborating and having fun together the whole next week. What are we waiting for? Let's roll!

As we arrived at the camp, introduction and communication games started. We all had a lot of fun drawing each other standing in two concentric circles and later on trying to find out three interesting facts about each other. Our drawings made on envelopes ended up on a Friendship Line where we will leave messages to each other for the rest of the week.

                     

The drawing activity was followed by a “snowball fight“. We got an exciting challenge to find the person whose name was written on one of the balls and then a person whose hobby was written down on another ball. Sounds quite unbelievable, but in one hour we talked to almost every student at the camp and learnt quite a lot of interesting facts about each other.

                     

Having learnt about each other, we were divided into six groups. Our goal was to create our camp rules. We had a chance to get to every group to discuss every site at the camp using the World Cafe method. At the end, when we got back to our initial groups, we chose 3-5 main rules for every site discussed that we are ready to follow every day that we are on this camp.

                    

The day ended by the campfire. Tutors Tomas and Simas introduced us to the old Baltic way of setting fire and the relation of water and fire that make harmony. To our surprise, the fire was started without any matches, just using flint. The fire accompanied by our singing was taken to the campfire place and we all threw some salt, linen seeds and amber dust into the fire to make our wishes come true.
The day ended very quickly. We are eager to find out what the following days will offer to us :-)


                           




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