Skills Work - At Camp!

St. Lawrence College, Kingston

I spent my last week of camp at St. Lawrence College in Kingston.  This summer went really fast!  How did I get to the end already?

Our first workshop of the week was actually a tour.  We visited the MacLachlan Woodworking Museum, and we learned how to make shakes.  They’re really old-timey and we had to use an old-timey way of cutting the logs.  It’s kinda hard to explain, so I got some pictures!  We used a kind of saw thing, and had to hammer on it to cut the wood.  That’s not like using a saw at all!  But it cuts it the right way.  That got us all ready to do a carpentry workshop and boy am I a pro by now!  We made mini paddles, and we got to use power sanders!  We all added different coloured strips of wood to the centre of our paddles so they were all unique.  Carpentry can be really artistic, but nobody seems to really talk about that part.  Anyway, our leader was Barry, and he seemed like he had hung out with kids a lot.  That was really cool.

Our next workshop was culinary.  I’m gonna have to have a party and invite over all my friends and then feed them all the stuff I learned how to cook this summer!  Chef Richard and Chef Ryan showed us how to make turkey kabobs, which we ate for breakfast right away.  Then we spent the rest of the morning making pizza and cookies and that’s what we had for lunch!  Well, I managed to save a few cookies to take home and I gave them to my sister.  My mom said that was nice of me, but really I was just stuffed from all the food I had already eaten.  Don’t tell her!

I think my favourite workshop of the week was masonry, because we got to actually make bricks.  I’m not joking!  Our leader, Dave, gave us a couple of different moulds that we filled with cement, and when it was almost dry, he said we could write our names in a brick or put a handprint in, and we got to take our bricks home!  That was cool.  We also learned how to spread mortar, and we did some surveying.  I always wondered what those construction workers were doing with that stuff!  They use it to measure slopes and levels and stuff.  Anyway, that was fun.

Our last workshop of the week was electrical, and we wired up a button to a bell so that when you pushed the button, the bell would ring.  And right after, we built propeller cars with our camp leaders, Jessica and Emily.  So the cars made a lot of sense, because we had talked about circuits and built one already.  The person who ran the electrical workshop, James, talked a lot about safety.  I definitely noticed a lot of people talking about safety this summer!  But James actually explained some stuff.  Like why we have to wear different types of safety gear, even when it doesn’t seem necessary.  I thought that was really helpful.

The week ended with our big TV debut!  CKWS came out to watch us after we finished making our gliders and filmed us doing our big launching competition!  It was so, so awesome.  We got to be on TV!  And the glider competition is fun – we make the gliders out of balsa wood and Styrofoam sheets and create them however we want, and then we have a contest to see who’s plane goes the furthest, or the straightest or whose is most acrobatic.  Did I mention it was on TV??

Well, I guess I’d better get my school supplies ready to go.  I had such a blast at camp, trying out lots of different skilled trades!  My school doesn’t have any design and technology classes, but I really, really want to take some when I get to high school!  I hope all my camp leaders had a great time too, because they were awesome!  Thanks, Skills Canada – Ontario!  Maybe I’ll see you next summer!!