FIRST CHURCH KIDS CAMP A SUCCESS!

One of the volunteers at the first ever Cookham Kids Camp, Caroline Donald, tells us what the week was like for her.

I read the following sentence and, like lots of working parents, thought: 'Bonus.' "First Ever Church Kids' Summer Holiday Camp in Cookham - it's a week long and it

costs £30." So I hotfooted it down to The Stationery Depot to buy a ticket. Read on and I might be able to convince you that it will be worth it next year when the organisers are persuaded that they really do have the stamina to do it all over again.

Not only did I buy a ticket for my six-year-old but I also volunteered to be a group leader... This involved supervising picnic lunches, making sure that 11 six-year-olds got safely from the Parish Centre to the Paddock to the Church and back again about six times a day for all the planned activities, and generally making sure that none of the little ones had run off.

If you're wondering why I volunteered to help, there were two reasons. First was a set of master manipulation tactics from my six-year-old daughter, and the second was a strong sense of wanting to give something to the church and to the community in terms of time and effort not money.

When we needed the church last year at the time of a family bereavement, they were there for us, so this was my opportunity to do something in return. And I had no idea how amazing that 'something' would turn out to be. No idea of the sheer exhaustion at the end of every day, no idea of how brilliant it was to see children learning how to be part of a team, helping each other. And it was a great reminder of how magical it is to see elderly people teaching and helping young children.

I was leading a daily 45-minute group session and had help in the form of a friend, who teaches and who did a lesson plan for both of us for the first couple of days with arts and crafts thrown in. My group were thrilled to paint a polystyrene cup blue, glue on their cut-out figure of Jesus and colour him in, thread a ribbon through a hole in the bottom of the cup and - hey presto - there's a cloud on the top with a personalised message about The Ascension written on the back. Job done. But that was only 45 minutes. The rest of their day was filled with Games Time aka rounders, tag rugby, football, beach volleyball, badminton and a kids' Immortal Fitness bootcamp in the Paddock; arts and crafts in the Briggs room - and I mean properly amazing arts and crafts run by ladies who can sew and make bracelets out of beads, and help with making an aquarium out of blue card, stick on glittery sea creatures, cut out decorated paper fish, string them into twine, fold the paper across, make a couple of neat holes and then stick a straw in between to dangle the fish on. RESPECT to those ladies. There was quilting for the older ones, daily quizzes, Dave the Disco for everyone (can someone please tell me where he gets his energy?) and donated hotdogs, choccie cake and ice lollies for lunch one day. There was the 'take a pile of newspaper and some sticky tape and wrap your chosen team member up' competition - very popular - junk modelling and painting, designing and painting cloth panels for a display, tag graffiti panels and my group made a large cardboard castle from scratch. There was outdoor drama where the children learned how to make different sounds for the weather, recite tongue-twisters and pretend to be goblins, giants or witches and chase each other silly. The organiser (who also runs the Sunday school at Holy Trinity) struck just the right note of having fun, being authoritative without being bossy, and being approachable without being a pushover. Hello, our kids need to see people like this in action! And if there's a stampede for tickets next year, I'm going to be in that queue because I don't want kindness and good manners and showing a bit of love to be old-fashioned values, I want them to be values that kids know about now.