Carolina Fleix, one of the founders of English Summer S.A. along with her brothers: “We make English learning fun, but don’t forget it is summer time, and kids need to play and enjoy their free time, too.”

Robinzonada

- Carolina, please, tell us about history of English Summer Camps company?

English Summer Camps is a family business created by my mum, who is from England and used to teach English, and my dad who used to work in hotels. My brothers and I have been working in the company for more than 35 years now. We started with 15 children in our summer house in Vallclara. Those 15 children doubled the following year and then we decided to create the company. There have been more than 45.000 students during the last 37 years.

The main purpose is to train people to develop successfully in the future, both in the working world and society. Thanks to the languages learnt and the values we teach such as companionship, solidarity, collaboration, and overcoming personal goals. We do this through education values in free time activities, considered to be one of the best tools for personal enrichment and development.


Our courses are based on the Teaching of English as a foreign language and our saying is that we make English learning fun, don’t forget it is summer time, and kids need to play and enjoy their free time. In the morning, they go to class but in the afternoon, they do lots of activities such as: going to the beach activities in the swimming pool, play sports such as football, basketball or volleyball. We also have in our programme other activities for those who don’t enjoy sports as much: art and craft, music, dance, robotics etc.. All our teachers are native, so our students must speak in English at all times, although when they play sports its inevitable to use their mother tongue: Spanish or Catalan, etc.

- What is special about your camps?

We have camps in 4 different locations in Tarragona, Spain - Poblet, Prades, Tamarit and Vallclara. Parents can choose both day camp programs or language programs. We teach many languages as english, spanish and also german and chinese.


- Where do the campers and counsellors come from?

They come from all around Spain, as well as from other countries such as France, Italy, England or Russia.

- Tell us more about your daily schedule?

We have a very structured schedule in our camps.

In the morning, every monitor wakes up their students with music and in a fun way and they do what we call “the morning exercises”.

Then, they have breakfast and they go to class (from 10:00-11:30, 30 min break then 12:00-13:30). After class, they have lunch and they go back for the last hour of class which is more active, we do theatre, music, writing a blog.


In the afternoon, they do leisure activities and by 20:30 they have dinner and, at night, they have a theme party every day: pirate’s night, rock and roll…

At 23:00 lights out!

- How do you train your staff?

We have every year a Training Weekend before the camps with all our counsellors (veterans and new candidates) so we can see what skills they have and if they are meant to work at English Summer. We also have what we call “the Monitoring Project”, where our students can become monitors and obtain the title so they can work on our summer camps. Monitors are trained in Health and safety during the weekend and most of them have red cross first aid certificates.

- What percentage of campers return each year?

It depends between 60 and 75% of our campers return every summer. We tend to evaluate every child and make sure we know what every one of them need. We try to make them part of a group despite their differences.


I think what makes a successful and memorable summer is the idea of learning having fun. But amongst all the fact that they will get to know people, practice new activities and have memories that will last the rest of their lives.

Anyone can enjoy our camps because here they all become a great big family.



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