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Over the course of this four-day event, the Youth were able to participate in a wide range of activities. Such activities included a workshop where campers were taught Map and Compass techniques where they learned how to read topographical maps and use a compass to follow bearings on the map. Campers honed these skills by participating in a blindfolded activity and completing a line course. The youth participated in other traditional YLTS workshops, such as a craft project, Grange history trivia, Grange ritual and code reading, team building exercises, National Grange programs workshop, and drill. Youth also took an educational canoe trip along the Nashoba River. In canoes of two campers each, campers listened to their guide talk about some of the aquatic life along the river and the uses of the river in agriculture.
One of the highlights of camp this year was a service project where campers performed a traditional lip sync contest at the Life Care Center of Nashoba Valley. Campers presented their renditions of popular 1950s and 1960s songs, including songs like “Charlie Brown,” and “I’m Henry the VIIIth, I Am” to nearly 40 of the rest home’s residents. At the completion of the contest, campers discussed how they were touched by the reactions of their audience as they recalled the elderly woman who mouthed “Wild Thing” along with the youth and another woman who cried during one group’s umbrella choreographed performance of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” One camper was quoted, “It added meaning to a fun thing” and another stated that the event “gave purpose” to the lip sync.
Special thanks goes out to Brother Tom Severance for his workshop on ritual and code reading and Sister Edith Johnson for driving the van; also, Master Calvin Chase and Youth Committee members Diane Szkutak and Tom Johnson for all their help in making Youth Leadership Training School a tremendous success this year.
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